'+*. 



V > 



\ v ' '-^. 






•:0 s 






c, >' 






W 



*b o 



v * 



^ 















t/> ,\V 






> 









oo N 






, . 


















'^ ,^ v 



















V 
























ov" 



































,V •/• 



& " 



^ 



>* 



</> \V 






%^ 



^ ^ 






4 ~t, 



'++ f 









$ °<. 









V & 



,#V 












, '+ 






^ V* 












\ 






^ 









^ 







^ ^ * 





























'% 














\ 

6 * 




0< 












= ^ 


■nt 

















/WO 



"THUMPING ENGLISH LIES." 



Froude's Slanders 



IRELAND AND IRISHMEN. 



A Course of Lectures Delivered by him in Association Hall, New York, during 
October and November, 1872. 

WITH 

PREFACE AND NOTES 

BY 

Col. JAS. E. McGEE, 

AND 

WENDELL PHILLIPS'S VIEWS OF THE SITUATION. 



New York : 
J. A. McGEE, PUBLISHER, 

No. J BARCLAY STREET. 
1872. 



-J. 



J>f\ 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 

J. A. McGEE, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



PREFACE 



PREVIOUS to the arrival of James Anthony 
Froude among us, his advent was heralded 
by sundry paragraphs in the New York papers, 
which, from their uniform laudatory tone and strong 
family resemblance, induced many sceptical people 
to attribute them to that gentleman himself or to 
some person deeply in his counsels. His subsequent 
appearance in New York in the character of a lec- 
turer on Irish history was the signal for renewed 
encomiums on the -'distinguished historian," and 
leading articles even were devoted by a portion of 
the press to prove that he was all that was good, 
great, and illustrious in modem historical literature. 
The American people were congratulated on being 
at last in a position to obtain a full and clear expo- 
sition of the history of the quarrel between England 
and Ireland, and to hear an elaborate disquisition on 



Preface 



the causes that led to the disagreement between the 
two countries, with a philosophic summary of the 
mutual relations between the conquerors and the. 
vanquished. All this was to be done by one, said 
the New York Times, " who has studied Irish his- 
tory as no other man has." That ubiquitous but 
inquisitive class of Bohemians, the interviewers, 
speedily surrounded the eminent historian and 
embryo lecturer, and reproduced in their respective 
journals his most trivial remarks equally with his 
most profound observations; a prominent publish- 
ing house, probably with a keen eye to business, 
feted him magnificently ; while that portion of our 
mercantile community which is composed of Eng- 
lishmen or the agents of English houses fawned 
on him with a humility which argued more for 
their patriotism or 'prudence than for fheir man- 
hood. Everything, in fact, was done to excite 
public curiosity, and thus, at least, obtain for the 
distinguished visitor a large audience and a good 
reception on the occasion of his first lecture. 

Froude himself assisted in this combined move- 
ment in his favor. In his speech at the Scribner 
banquet, he was moderate, nay, even modest, in his 
speech, and very conciliatory in his manner; while 



Preface. 5 

to the various gentlemen of the press who called 
upon him for an expression of his views he was 
courteous, communicative, and apparently candid. 
He had no motive whatever, he assured them, in 
coming to. the United States to lecture but a desire 
to do justice to the people of Ireland, whose many 
good qualities he admired, and whose wrongs at 
the hands of England he strongly deprecated. He 
had lived thirty years in Ireland ; knew the people 
well, and admired them ; had enjoyed their hospi- 
tality, and had even been, during a long period of 
illness, nursed with unusual tenderness by an hum- 
ble peasant of the West ; with many other remarks 
of the same sort, and, as it has since prove'd, all of 
equal sincerity. 

Still, it seemed strange to many that a man who 
had gained an enviable reputation of a certain sort 
at home by maligning the ill-starred Mary Queen 
of Scots, and by becoming the eulogist of her mur- 
derer Elizabeth, and of the infamous Cecil, should 
have come so far to advocate the cause of a people 
who had suffered so much and so terribly from the 
persecutions of the latter personages, their aiders and 
abettors ; that an Englishman whose sole title to 
fame rested on his strong English and Protestant 



6 . Preface. 

prejudices should be at the pains of leaving his 
country and the society of his friends to vindicate 
the character and defend the good name of Catho- 
lic Ireland. Thus they wondered; but they said 
little, preferring to await events. 

These came soon enough, justifying and more 
than justifying all their prognostications. The very 
first lecture which Froude delivered in Association 
Hall in this city, before a large and what is called 
a fashionable audience, clearly demonstrated that 
what the newspapers had said in favor of his learn- 
ing and impartiality, and all that he himself had 
averred of his love for the people of Ireland, and his 
intention to defend the justice and truthfulness of 
their cause, and arraign England before the bar of 
the American people, were mere shams, lures to 
attract the public attention of a people the vast 
majority of whom he well knew have ever been 
and still are in full sympathy with the oppressed of 
all nations, and particularly with the Irish. The 
subject selected on that occasion was " The Con- 
quest of Ireland by the Normans," but the text of 
the discourse bore little affinity to the title. The 
condition of the country anterior to 1169, the long 
Danish wars that had depopulated the country, im- 



Preface. 7 

poverished the people, desolated the churches, dis- 
organized the hierarchy and clergy, and demoral- 
ized the people were not even alluded to. Ireland 
was, through no fault of hers, then in a state of great 
distress, and some dissension doubtless prevailed 
among her local rulers; and Mr. Froude's main 
object seemed to have been to prove that Henry 
II. and his filibusteros were, therefore, justified in 
attempting to subdue her. Now, it follows that if 
this point be well taken, as the lawyers say, the 
whole case is admitted; for, if England was justi- 
fied in invading Ireland on account of the latter's 
internal dissensions, she is justified in holding her 
as Ion? as these dissensions exist; and as the for- 
mer can and will always create these dissensions, 
she is justified in holding Ireland for ever. This is 
the matter in a nutshell, and it was evidently Froude's 
plea. But this is simply the argument of the robber ; 
certainly not the doctrine of a Christian or of an 
enlightened and philosophic historian, as Mr. 
Froude's friends claim him to be. But the lecturer 
had another point to make — an assault on the 
papacy ; and he of course introduced that much-dis- 
puted and very inefficacious document known as 
Pope Adrian's Bull. His first effort was, in fact, but 



8 Preface. 

the prelude to a general attack on Irish nationality 
as such, and on Catholics generally, no matter of 
what nation. 

His strategy was fully disclosed in his subsequent 
four lectures on " Ireland Under the Tudors," " The 
Penal Laws," " Grattan and Curran," and on " The 
Present Condition of Ireland " ; for even in his 
very last appearance before a New York audience, 
on the same subjects collectively, he wanders from 
Ireland and England to the revolt of the Nether- 
lands, and the alleged cruelties of the Duke d'Alva, 
to the massacre of S. Bartholomew in Paris, and 
even to Rome itself. In all his harangues, for it 
would be too great a stretch of courtesy to call 
them lectures, he carefully evades the main question 
at issue : Have the people of Ireland always had a 
right to govern themselves ? and has not England 
invaded those rights — persistently, cruelly, and un- 
justly deprived the people of their own laws, soil, 
and polity ? and how has it been done ? He dwells, 
it is true, on the wars of the Anglo-Irish lords of 
the Pale and the native Irish chiefs, the prolonged 
struggle of the great O'Neil with successive Eng- 
lish armies, the uprising of 1641, the confedera- 
tion of Kilkenny, the contest between James II. 



Preface. g 

and William of Orange, the efforts of the Catholics 
in the eighteenth century to evade the bloody pe- 
nal code, and the poverty and destitution of the 
people of the present century • but only to misstate 
facts, deduce inferences not justified by history, and 
draw conclusions totally absurd, if they were not so 
gravely false. 

Because the Irish fought for their existence 
in detail, Henry and Elizabeth were justified in 
slaughtering them indiscriminately ; the Scotch 
Presbyterians who purchased the confiscated land 
of Ulster tolerated the presence and even employed 
as menials a few of the rightful proprietors of the 
soil, consequently the sons of those so robbed had 
no right to regain their own lands as against the 
Undertakers aforesaid ; Cromwell, the hero of Wex- 
ford and Drogheda, on account of hanging two of 
his Roundhead soldiers for stealing a hen, was a 
model of justice and clemency; the penal laws, the 
most infamous code the modern world has yet seen, 
were not so bad after all, as they were the natural 
consequence of the stubborn and unreasonable re- 
sistance of the people to the will of the sovereign, 
who only wanted them to give up their religion ; 
the Union was necessary for the welfare of Eng- 



io Preface. 

land and a fortiori right ; and the terrible famine ot 
'46, '47, '48, was simply the consequence of the too 
rapid increase of the population ! This was the gist 
of his argument. 

Mr. Froude had respectable and, generally, in- 
telligent audiences ; but, as far as related to Ireland, 
their knowledge was less than of the interior of 
Africa. Ireland is not fashionable, you know, and 
then she is so Romish. They laughed heartily at 
his stale jokes, believed his wholesale charges 
against the character of the Irish people, and be- 
came " wild with enthusiasm," we are told, when he 
made a hit at the Catholic Church. The lecturer, 
though neither a witty nor a brilliant man, had little 
difficulty in seeing through their foibles. He ridi- 
culed the Irish judiciously, maligned them profusely, 
and now and then threw in a scrap of bigotry, by 
way of seasoning, to keep their attention awake, 
while he steadily pursued his chief design, which 
was to convince or persuade them that all the com- 
plaints of the Irish people against England are ill- 
founded ; that England is and ever has been the 
benefactor of her victim ; and, as a corollary, the 
American people should turn a deaf ear to all the 
accusations of the oppressed nation as causeless and 



Preface. 1 1 

unworthy serious consideration. This was the ver- 
tebra of his whole discourse. 

Now, will any one say that all this was done 
without a deep, far-seeing purpose ? That a man 
like Froude, so deeply engaged in important literary 
labors in London, will leave his club, his coteries, 
and his beloved State Paper Office, and spend 
months in a foreign country, for the sake of a few 
dollars or a slight increase of notoriety, is hardly 
credible, and we certainly must be excused if we 
do not believe it. He is but one of the many 
whom England has been and is employing to carry 
out her policy toward the exiled Irish on this con. 
tinent. Her vengeance is not bounded by the 
Atlantic. There is not an English official in this re- 
public, from the British Minister at Washington to 
the lowest understrapper at the smallest Consulate 
in the Union, who has not a lie or a sneer for the 
Irish. It comes as natural to them as to draw 
their salaries ; in fact, the two operations are more 
intimately connected than many people suppose. 

We do not know that Mr. Froude derives any 
pecuniary emolument from his lectures here other 
than that received from the sale of tickets ; but if, 
on his return, he does not become the recipient of 



1 2 . Preface. 

some token of gratitude from his Government, we 
shall be very much disappointed. There are a 
great many ways in a monarchy of rewarding a du- 
tiful subject besides paying him money. Honors, 
titles, social recognition in higher society than that 
in which he is accustomed to move, influence in 
Downing Street for his poor relations, and a thou- 
sand other inducements we might mention, are held 
out by the English authorities to those who serve 
them well ; and, though Mr. Froude may not have 
succeeded to any appreciable extent in dividing the 
mass of Americans from their fellow-citizens of Irish 
birth, his coolness, audacity, and zeal deserved suc- 
cess. 

This gentleman may not be either a veracious or 
a profound historian, but he wields a facile pen 
dextrously, and has more twists and turns mentally 
than the famous labyrinth of Crete is said to have 
had topographically. Among others, he has a 
fashion of uttering a falsehood, then denying it, 
then mitigating it by another, and again, when de- 
tected, offering on impossible terms to prove he is 
guiltless. Doubtless he will issue his late lectures 
on Ireland in book form, and, as he must, on reflec- 
tion, be ashamed of many of the statements made 



Preface, 13 

by him to please his Association Hall audience, he 
may possibly seek to slun over, explain, or totally 
eliminate them, we think it well to present them to 
the public at the earliest moment as taken down by 
the best reporters at the time of utterance, so that 
all may be able to judge by comparison how little 
faith James Anthony Froude has in his own asser- 
tions or in his own knowledge of the true facts of 
Irish history. J. E. M. 

New York, December, 187a. 



Froudfs First Lecture. 

DELIVERED OCTOBER 16, 1872. 



Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I have come to this country to address 
you on the history of the connection be- 
tween two islands in both of which I 
presume that you feel an interest, and I 
cannot better introduce the subject than 
by reading to you a letter once written by 
an American Ambassador to an English 
Prime Minister. The occasion was the Irish 
Rebellion of 1798, when seventy Irish 
gentlemen of birth and fortune who had 
been secretly concerned in the insurrection 
were in the hands of the Government. 



1 8 Fronde s Lectures. 

They had been engaged in correspondence 
with the Directory of the French Republic. 
They had been betrayed by their own 
confederates, as so many times Irish con- 
spirators have been betrayed, and they 
were banished from Ireland on condition 
that they should retire to some country 
then at peace with Great Britain ; and it 
was understood that they meant to seek an 
asylum in the United States. Your repre- 
sentative in England then was Mr. Rufus 
King, a name honorably known through 
more than one generation of American 
statesmen. There survives yet a letter of 
remonstrance addressed by Mr. King to 
our Prime Minister, in which he urges 
England to debar these seventy gentlemen 
from making the United States their place 
of retreat, dreading such an acquisition to 
any nation. 

The lecturer read the letter, a quaintly 
worded epistle, and made these comments : 



Fronde s Lectures. 



19 



I suppose that if an ambassador from this 
country should write such a letter in these 
days he would not have a very long tenure 
of office. It is now the pride of both 
England and America to offer a safe 
asylum to any patriot or any refugee from 
persecution and misfortune. 

It is needless to say that the entreaty of 
Mr. King was not acted upon, and that 
most of these gentlemen died quiet citizens 
of the United States, and America has been 
since a land of promise to the Irish nation. 
The Irishman at the present day looks to 
America as his natural protector. Thus 
she has become, whether for good or evil, 
a party to Irish politics. She is the 
Supreme Court of Appeal in the Irish 
imagination, and if ever the hatchet is to be 
buried,, if ever Celtic Protestant and Irish 
Catholic are to end their quarrel in a 
general reconciliation, it will be when this 
country has pronounced that Ireland ought 



20 Fronde s Lectures, 

to be satisfied and has no longer a griev- 
ance which legislation can remove. 

I am not here to talk commonplaces 
about English tyranny or Irish acrimony, 
but the fact remains that at this day, after 
700 years of forced connection, we are still 
unmatched. If the votes of the Irish 
population were taken, men for men, two- 
thirds would ask for a separation, immedi- 
ate and eternal. It stands confessed before 
all the world that after all our efforts we 
have not made friends. Seven centuries of 
of injury divide us. They desire us simply 
to take ourselves away, and leave them to 
manage their own affairs in their own way 
as they best please. When we have clear- 
ed out and trouble them no more, they will 
then be willing, perhaps, to interchange 
civilities with us, to take our money if we 
are pleased to lend it to them. If they 
could leave their anchorage and float their 
island away into the middle of the Atlantic, 



Froudcs Lectures. 



21 



I don't think we should have any right to 
object. To have to part from a high-spirit- 
ed and brilliant race to whom we have 
given our laws and language, who have 
distinguished themselves in our institutions, 
would be a disgrace to our statesmanship ; 
but, if the Irish persisted in it, we could not 
deny that the experiment of a forced union 
has been tried long enough. We should 
be obliged then to bid them God speed. 

But philosophers have not yet discover- 
ed how to uproot the soil of Ireland, and so 
long as England remains a great power, 
with fleets, and navies, and commercial in- 
terests in every corner of the world, 
England cannot, England will not let go 
her hold upon an island lying close under 
her side. She cannot risk the possibility 
of a hostile state establishing itself between 
her and the Atlantic. She will not consent 
either to a separation or to measures 
designed to bring it about. Every con- 



22 Fronde s Lectures. 

9 

cession which will promote the happiness 
of the Irish people we are willing to make, 
we are willing to volunteer ; but we cannot 
commit political suicide. Until England is 
beaten upon her knees, Ireland must share 
the fortunes of the stronger country. If 
the Irish race refuses to be reconciled to 
us, then we must continue as we are — each 
a thorn in the other's side — or they must 
themselves seek another home, or else they 
must fight for their independence, and win 
it like men. Should they achieve such an 
enterprise, though my duty would then be 
to my country, and though I would strug- 
gle to hold Ireland to its obedience, yet, as 
a member of the great human brotherhood, 
when it was done, I should willingly wel- 
come them as another among the nations 
of the earth. 

But political freedom, gentlemen, is too 
precious a jewel to be lightly owned. It is 
not to insubordination and mutiny, it is not 



Fronde s Lectures, 23 

to oratory and newspaper articles, that the 
fates award the crown of national independ- 
ence. That crown is the reward only of 
united, persistent determination to be free 
— a determination which flinches from no 
danger, admits of no compromise, but 
expresses itself in deed as well as in word. 

To win independence, they must first 
learn to obey. They must learn subordi- 
nation and self-sacrifice. They must forget 
their quarrels and feuds, uniting themselves 
into one harmonious whole with a common 
purpose. To bestow independence upon a 
people who have never earned it is to give 
wings to those who have never learned to 
fly. Those who desire to be free must first 
show that they can control themselves. 

If I were to sum up in one sentence the 
secret of Ireland's misfortunes, I should say 
it lay in this : that while from the first she 
has resisted England, complained of Eng- 
land, appealed to Heaven and earth against 



24 Fronde s Lectures. 

the wrongs England has inflicted on her, 
she has ever invited others to help her, and 
never herself made an effective fight with 
her own ranks. Compare the history of 
Scotland with that of Ireland. England 
first invaded Scotland, and endeavored to 
incorporate it into England by force. The 
whole Scottish people told Edward it 
should not be. England could overrun 
their country, build castles and garrison 
them — she could intrigue, bribe, and threat- 
en. The English failed. They could not 
kill the whole people, and while the people 
lived the people were determined to be 
free. England found it had a wolf by the 
throat. She could not strangle it, the 
effort to hold it down was too exhausting 
to be maintained, and the contest was aban- 
doned. To-day a union exists between the 
two, and it was effected on equal terms. 
To-day Scotland retains her religion, all her 
laws; the Scottish nobles remain on the soil 



Fronde's Lectures. 



25 



which they so nobly defended. Out of the 
union of England and Scotland arose the 
country which the world knows as Great 
Britain. 

Ireland, too, was invaded. Ireland, in- 
stead of a narrow river and a dry marsh for 
a frontier, had a trench of sea before her 70 
miles across. She had a larger population 
than Scotland, and a country no less diffi- 
cult to be overrun ; yet the invaders fastened 
themselves upon her soil, and she to-day re- 
mains under the yoke of the stranger. She 
has had no Bannockburn, she has had no 
Bruce nor Wallace. She persists that she 
is in chains, and she cannot break them. 
She has all the liberty which England 
and Scotland have. There is no country 
in the world where a government can be 
defied with so much immunity, and where 
mutiny is allowed so much freedom of 
speech, as in Ireland at the present day. 
Yet she makes nothing of it. 



26 Fronde s Lectures. 

What is the explanation of the difference ? 
Are the Irish less brave than the Scots? 
They have proved their courage on a hun- 
dred battle-fields. Was Ireland occupied 
in such overwhelming force that resistance 
was impossible? Forty thousand British 
were defeated at Bannockburn. For five 
centuries the English available force in Ire- 
land rarely exceeded 1,500 men. The Irish 
were forever quarrelling among themselves. 
The Scots were together. A Douglas 
cared more for his country than himself. 
An O'Donneli would take the English side 
if they would help him to a slice of his 
neighbor's land. An old proverb says: 
" When you find an Irishman on the spit, 
you can always find two other Irishmen to 
turn it." O'Donneli was no exception. 
He it was who, when reproached for selling 
his country, said he thanked God that he 
had a country to sell ! 

No people ever allowed performance to 



Fronde's Lectures. 



27 



limp so miserably behind promise. Look 
at the history of Irish Rebellions, and you 
read that the temptation of revenge upon 
the hereditary foe has been stronger than 
the hatred of the national foe. Who does 
not know, if familiar at all with the history 
of Ireland, that, if accident set Ireland free 
to-morrow, the first step after a declaration 
of independence would be a declaration of 
civil war? But until Ireland is united in 
its determination to have liberty or die, 
independence would be a curse to her. 
England has only one wish for Ireland, and 
that is to give her all the advantages and 
blessings she can. Separation we cannot 
agree to. All else we yield to, and I ap- 
peal to American opinion to assist us in de- 
termining what more can we do than has 
been already done. The English and Irish 
are divided by a cloud of mutual distrust, 
and cannot understand each other. I be- 
lieve you wish well to England. The Eng- 



28 Fronde s Lectures, 

lish-speaking race are connected by ties 
which cannot exist between any other 
countries. Ireland lies between us. On 
one or other or on both of us her future 
fate depends. America may form the 
intermediate element with which a combi- 
nation hitherto impossible may be at last 
effected. 

At any rate, England will never be able 
to resist the expressed opinion of America 
as to the character of her relations with 
Ireland. Let America pronounce any 
judgment with the impartial authority of a 
mutual friend, such a judgment will carry 
a weight with it which we shall be unable 
to oppose. I don't believe we shall desire 
to oppose it. If we do, a declaration of 
opinion in the name of justice will be likely, 
sooner or later, in some shape or another, 
at one time or another, to convert itself 
into force. On the other hand, when the 
voice of America tells the Irishman that 



Fronde's Lectures. 



29 



justice has been done to him ; when he 
learns from a quarter which he cannot sus- 
pect that if he wants independence he must 
win it for himself, and that he must rely in 
future upon his own industry, I believe the 
Irishman will then be satisfied. 

But the Irishman has been called a rebel 
and whipped ; he has been patted on the 
back, and told that no poor country since 
the world began has been treated as his 
country has been. There is no remedy for 
him, it has been said, but to manage him by 
Irish ideas. Let us have the one thing 
which has never yet been tried for him — 
steady, impartial justice. The Irishman re- 
quires to be ruled by just laws — laws which 
shall defend the weak from the strong, and 
the poor from the rich. If he is incorri- 
gible, then I will give him up ; but the ex 
periment remains to be tried. A move 
ment in this direction has lately been 
begun. The Irish Land Act of Mr. Glad- 



30 Fronde s Lectures. 

stone is the most righteous measure which 
has been passed for thirteen centuries. It 
is no easy matter to touch in old countries 
what are called the laws of property, and 
we are compelled to move slowly. I don't 
know how you find it here, gentlemen, but 
free institutions have a tendency in most 
countries to throw quite as much power as 
is good for them into the hands of the rich. 
That, at least, is our experience. The rich 
man finds the world so pleasant to him that 
he thinks it well enough, and hardly cares 
to have it do better, especially if he is 
obliged to put his hand in his own pocket. 
But we have made a beginning, and we 
invite you to help us out with the problem. 
You need not tell us to come out of Ire- 
land, for we cannot and will not. There is 
a case on both sides and a counter-case. 
There are direct claims and indirect claims. 
There are injuries which to the Irish imagi- 
nation seem mountainous, and by us are 



Froude's Lectures. 31 

not denied, yet can be explained, as we be- 
lieve. 

The lecturer then sketched somewhat at 
length the wrongs of Ireland, pleading the 
extenuations in behalf of his own country, 
and addressing himself to his audience as 
gracious and impartial arbitrators, inclined 
naturally toward those who have been op- 
pressed, and yet not unwilling to hear 
what may be urged in the way of extenua- 
tion. He went back to the days of the 
Norman Conquest, when England, though 
permeated with a strange people, retained 
her individuality, while Ireland lost her 
own ; and he made an amusing delin- 
eation of the characteristics which so 
strongly mark the Irish character, an in- 
dulgence in which, the lecturer argued, had 
up to this time rendered them incapable 
of intelligent and steady self-government. 
The superstitious legends of saints and 
their powers came in for a share of witty 



32 Fronde's Lectures. 

mention, and the Irish fondness for brawls 
was not forgotten in the lecturer's sum- 
ming up of the discouraging elements in 
the Irish disposition. He followed the 
history of the Normans in Ireland from 
the time they subjugated the whole people 
with 60,000 of their own men, and conclud- 
ed the lecture by reading a description of 
Ireland as it was when left to itself at the 
close of the fifteenth century, before the 
second period of English interposition, 
leaving it to the audience to judge for 
themselves whether it was for the interest 
of humanity that Ireland should then be 
left to enjoy her independence. 



Froude's Second Lecture. 



DELIVERED OCTOBER 19, 1872. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

The only remark that I wish to make — 
I trust I am not out of order in making it — 
is that I observe a very distinguished ora- 
tor of this city, whose name is as well 
known across the Atlantic as it is here, and 
whose speeches I have often myself read 
with very great pleasure and instruction, 
was pleased to speak of the Bull of Pope 
Adrian, to which I alluded in my last lec- 
ture, as " being a thundering English lie." 
Well, if it was an English lie, it was a Nor- 
man lie ; and I am sure Father Burke must 



34 



Fronde s Lectures. 



have made that remark with very great 
distress to himself, being as he is a Nor- 
man, of very eminent Norman descent. 
There is no purer blood in Ireland than 
that of the Burkes ; and I think I can re- 
lieve his mind about the fact of Pope Adri- 
an's having issued the Bull. If Father 
Burke will have the kindness to look into a 
volume of papers lately published from the 
archives of the Vatican by Dr. Tiner, he 
will not find that particular Bull ; but he 
will find a letter from his successor, in 
which that Bull is spoken of, and dwelt 
upon as the only basis of the authority 
which the English exercised in Ireland. I 
am quite sure Father Burke will have great 
pleasure in doing that. 

In my first lecture, I described the Nor- 
man conquest of Ireland, and the final re- 
sult of it after three centuries of universal 
anarchy. I have now to draw your atten- 
tion to the person of an English prince 



Fronde s Lecture s. 



35 



whom 1 have been accused of attempting 
to whitewash — King Henry the Eighth, 
the English Bluebeard ! It is astonishing 
what accusations people will allow them- 
selves to make. In this place, happily, I 
have nothing to do with King Henry's ma- 
trimonial relations, but have only to deal 
with him as an English sovereign. He 
was a hater of disorder, and he determined, 
if possible, to end disorder in Ireland. He 
sent the Duke of Norfolk over to invite the 
Irish chiefs to a friendly conference. He 
wished, he said, " to proceed with sober 
ways and amiable persuasions founded in 
law and reason, rather than by strength 
and violence." He didn't mean to force 
the Irish to submit to the English law ; still 
less did he wish to deprive the chiefs of 
their lands and heritages. He sought ra- 
ther to conserve them in their own, to gain 
their assistance in reducing Ireland to 
quiet. They had laws of their own if they 



2,6 Froudes Lectin 

would execute them. He <de Norfolk 
point to them how wretched th y had 
made their country. There corld be no 
order and prosperity, he said, untu the sen- 
sualities of an unbridled people were 
brought under _e law. 

In this respect, at any rate, he must be 
allowed to have been moderate. No re- 
monstrance could have been more gentle. 
The next step he took was harsher. You 
have probably heard of Irish absentees, 
who have never gone near their estates, 
but lived away from them, and simply oc- 
cupied themselves in consuming the rents 
which came. For the modern English 
statesman there is nothing so sacred as 
property. It was proposed, at the begin- 
ning of the century, to attach the rents of 
the absentees, and there was immediately a 
great outcry all over the country ; but 
King Henry VIII. took an entirely differ- 
ent view. He simply in one sweep took 



Froudc s Lectures. 37 

away, the ; ates of those gentlemen and 
gave .hei.j to others. It was confiscate 1, 
but confiscation of a kind I heartily wish 
there was more of. 

Neituer this, however, nor the persua- 
sions of the Duke of Nc '^.lk produced any 
effect upon the Irish chiefs. They pre- 
ferred their own ways, and intended to 
keep them. The Englishman who wrote 
the description of Ireland I read in my 
last lecture had stated very correctly that 
the most deserving of the people in the 
country were the Irish peasantry, whom 
the chiefs were trampling on. He recom- 
mrnded, if nothing else should serve, that 
the peasantry should be armed, and drilled, 
and officered, and in that condition, he 
reasoned, they would compel their masters 
to be just to them. I wish it had been 
adopted. It would have been best in every 
way, and would have amounted to the 
establishment of an Irish police three cen- 



38 Fronde s Lectures. 

turies sooner. But it was thought too 
violent a remedy, and was not tried. The 
next best plan would have been to send 
over a small English army to have acted as 
police, to have established laws, and com- 
pelled rich and poor to obey them. But 
England did not like to pay taxes to main- 
tain standing armies of this kind. The 
Duke of Norfolk said he could no nothing 
without a military force of some kind. So 
King Henry was driven back to trying 
home rule in another form. There was an 
Earl of Kildare, the head of the house of 
Geraldine. He was exceedingly popular 
with the Irish people. He promised to do 
all that was right and proper if King 
Henry would trust the government to him, 
and so this method was tried. But the 
Geraldines, although in London very much 
like other people, over in Ireland were 
more Irish than the Irish themselves. The 
rule of the Geraldines was simolv the rule 



Fronde s Lectures, 39 

of Irish ideas : that every one was to do as 
he pleased, and the stronger was to perse- 
cute the weaker. Everything-, then, went 
on as before. 

King Henry, with all his known weakness, 
was a choleric sort of gentleman at times. 
"By heaven!" he seemed to say, " if this 
people will not learn their lesson, I must 
try the whip with them." Kildare was 
arrested and sent to London, and a few 
companies were sent over to Ireland. And 
now there comes one of the episodes of 
which you read. Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, 
son of Kildare, as soon as he heard of his 
father's arrest, broke out in insurrection, 
and called upon all to help him. He began 
with the murder of an archbishop. There 
was a great deal of satisfaction at that, and 
everybody was in arms, and there was 
shouting and hurrahing, and burning of 
villages, and massacring of people, and all 
the usual accompaniments of an insurrec- 



40 Fronde s Lectures. 

tion of this kind. It lasted until the 
English Governor landed with a few hun- 
dred soldiers, and then the patriot army 
just melted away like a snowdrift. Lord 
Thomas, with five of his uncles, was exe- 
cuted for this business. When a nobleman 
is sent to the scaffold, the eyes of all men 
gush out like rivers, and the shout of in- 
dignation rises. The meaner multitude 
may perish by thousands, and their memo- 
ry perishes with them. Mankind, truly, 
are most absurd beings in their judgment. 
If young lords wish to keep their heads on 
their shoulders, they ought not to murder 
archbishops. But the time had come when 
a new element was about to be introduced 
into the quarrel between England and 
Ireland. 

To certain minds, especially the Teutonic 
mind, the Catholic religion had become 
incredible. Before the Norman Conquest. 
Ireland's devotion to Popery had been at. 



Fronde s Lectures. 41 

least lukewarm. Henry VIII., when he 
broke with the Pope, had left Mass stand- 
ing, so that the religious services remained 
unaltered. The Irish bishops — I am speak- 
ing now of the bishops of Henry VII I. 's 
time, and not of Elizabeth's time — for- 
swore the oath and took the oath to the 
King without any difficulty. That they 
afterward took the oath to Elizabeth is an 
entire illusion, but it is perfectly certain 
that they did for Henry VIII. There 
were many hundreds of convents and 
abbeys in Ireland. The King dissolved 
them, and the lands were granted away to 
the Irish fiefs. Irish religion, until that 
time, had set singularly easy on both chief 
and prelate. Some of the bishops had large 
families. They were a lax set; very unlike 
the venerable gentlemen whom we are 
accustomed to see in such stations. Be- 
tween them and the laity there was no 
special affection. The young Lord Kil- 



42 Frondes Lectures. 

dare, a grandson of the Earl, in one of his 
follies, burned a cathedral. He was called 
to account afterward. " Be Jasus ! my 
lords," he explained, " I could not have 
done it, but I thought his grace the arch- 
bishop was inside !" A change was com- 
ing in these matters, but it had not come 
in the days of Henry VIII. The chiefs, 
after the Geraldine Rebellion, seemed in- 
clined to be on good terms with him. A 
grand parliament was held in Dublin. All 
seemed well disposed toward England. 
Up to this time, the Pope had been the 
actual sovereign of Ireland, and the kings 
of England had ruled it only as the Pope's 
vicegerents. At this parliament, the Pope 
was thrown overboard. The King of Eng- 
land was declared henceforward the King 
of Ireland. The Celtic leaders came into 
power. 

For some reason or other, King Henry 
VIII. seemed to please the Irish. It 



Fronde s Lectures. 43 

is hard to say why, unless it was because 
they felt that he meant well by them. He 
showed no desire to seize the lands of Irish 
owners and distribute them to adventurers, 
and as long as he lived Ireland showed no 
disposition to separate itself from England. 

Whence, then, came the change which 
followed immediately afterward ? It arose 
from two causes. The habits of centuries 
cannot be changed in a generation, and the 
quarrel with the Pope was followed by the 
birth of the Protestant religion. 

Henry VIII. had not altered religion, 
strictly speaking. He had left the Mass 
standing, and, as far as the body of the 
people were concerned either in England or 
Ireland, the only true difference they ex- 
perienced was that their affairs, whatever 
they were, could be settled at home with- 
out their having the trouble and expense 
of sending counsel or other people to re- 
present them at Rome. The immediate 



44 Frondes Lectures. 

successor of King Henry declared war 
against the Mass. A ritual which had been 
of universal use for many centuries was 
abolished by a stroke of the pen. The pro- 
tector, Somerset, and his companions con- 
sidered that they had a mission to extirpate 
idolatry. Churches were plundered, and 
sacred desks were desecrated and turned 
down. Every object of superstition was 
insulted with ostentatious profanity. They 
went too fast even for England, and drove 
Ireland entirely wild. They taught her the 
fatal lesson that unless she supported the 
Pope she would have to part with religion 
as well. At this critical moment, the mind 
of Ireland thus received an irrevocable 
twist. She was threatened with a revolu- 
tion, social as well as spiritual, and Irish 
ideas and traditions, which Henry VIII. 
had begun to assail, linked themselves in- 
separably with the laws of God and piety. 
Queen Mary— " Bloody Mary "—followed 



Fronde s Lectures. 45 

her brother, and the pendulum swung 
violently back, and the papal supremacy 
was restored. The creed, it was per- 
ceived, could not stand without the Pope. 
Ministers and bishops who had counte- 
nanced the separation of Rome confessed 
their errors and did penance. England was 
restored to the bosom of her mother, and it 
was all settled by the funeral fires of three 
hundred men and women who were 
burned up at the stake. Ireland furnished 
no such martyrs, for in Ireland not a Pro- 
testant yet existed. Those who had been 
sent from England fled away. The peni- 
tent Irish chiefs replaced the monks and 
nuns, with means sufficient to support 
them. The young Earl of Kildare came 
back and was reinstated. The Catholic 
reaction which was sweeping around 
through Europe caught the Irish in its 
stream. Ireland chose her place on the 
Pope's side, and chose it irrevocably, and 



46 Fronde s Lectures. 

from the moment another Protestant sover- 
eign ascended the English throne the cause 
of the Catholic religion and the cause of 
Irish independence became inseparably and 
irrevocably one. 

So stood the matter at the opening of 
the reign — in some respects, I may call it 
the great and glorious reign — of Queen 
Elizabeth. It was then that England be- 
came the ardent champion of the Reforma- 
tion, burst her narrow limits, and became a 
great power in the world. It was then — 
but I must not linger over the brilliant 
aspect of the period. I have to do with 
the land on which the sun of all that glory 
never shone, on which the shadow fell 
darker from the lustre elsewhere, black as 
polar midnight. 

I shall endeavor to be just to all parties. 
Elizabeth never sought the dangers thrust 
upon her. Your own great historian, 
whom I have been proud to call my friend, 



Fronde s Lectures. 



47 



Mr. Motley, rather blames her backward- 
ness than finds fault with her overalacrity. 
While the Catholics speak of her as a 
scourge and tyrant, Mr. Motley quarrels 
with her lukewarmness. In a quarrel so 
desperate, I think she did well in hesitating 
to take up the sword. When she did draw 
it, she didn't sheathe it again until the star of 
liberty, which at one time was threatening 
to come down in blood, became fixed for 
ever in the northern heavens never again 
to grow pale. That Ireland, having thrown 
in her fortune in the losing side, should 
share in the defeat and suffer from it was 
inevitable. Would that I could say that 
Elizabeth's conduct toward that country 
had been as upright as her cause was just, 
and that she had borrowed no poisoned ar- 
rows from the quiver of her adversaries ! 
In the main, I insist that she desired only 
good to Ireland. Elizabeth came to the 
throne, and found she had to keen in order 



48 .Fronde s Lectures. 

two furious faetions who, if she let them 
loose, desired nothing so much as to tear 
each other to pieces. She returned, as far 
as the altered circumstances would allow, 
to her father's policy. She sent the Pope 
about his business again, and established 
the English Episcopal Church, with the 
Apostolic succession, as it is called, and a 
liturgy so like the Mass that the clergy at 
home now use it who differ from the Catho- 
lics in nothing except the papal suprem- 
acy ; while it was elastic enough for Pro- 
testants to use it in a sense of their own. It 
was sometimes asked, Why could not Eliza- 
beth have left her subjects to choose their 
own religion — left religion free, as we say 
now? Simply because it was impossible. 
The Roman Catholic religion it was impos- 
sible for her to tolerate, because the 
Roman Catholic religion declared her a 
public enemy, and never ceased from the 
moment she came to the throne to use 



Fronde s Lectures. 



49 



every possible means to drive her from it. 
If she had allowed Catholics and Protest- 
ants to have their separate chapels, it 
would have been found in England as in 
France that there would have been civil 
war and fighting in every town and village. 
They say something may perhaps be urged 
for this policy in England where they were 
half Protestants, but why did she try it in 
Ireland, where there were no Protestants ? 
It is easier to blame her for what she did 
than to say precisely what she ought to 
have done. 

The Irish ^ pretend that if she had left 
their religion alone they would have re- 
mained good subjects. She would have 
been an exceedingly sanguine person if she 
had trusted to any such expectation. So 
long as England was Protestant, Ireland, 
whether she was disturbed in the matter of 
her religion or not, would* have been equal- 
ly on the side of Elizabeth's enemies ; and 



50 Fronde s Lectures. 

it is to be understood that the idea of gov- 
erning Ireland by a province is repugnant 
altogether to English principles. What- 
ever forms of freedom England possessed, 
it was essential that Ireland should have 
the same forms of freedom. Ireland was 
to be governed constitutionally, it was said, 
by her own Lords and Commons. The 
bishops formed an actual majority in the 
House of Upper Lords of Ireland, and to 
have allowed them to remain there without 
requiring from them so much as an oath to 
the sovereign would have been to hand 
over Ireland to her deadly enemies. 

What, then, did Elizabeth ' do ? These 
Bishops had taken the oath of supremacy 
to her father. She required them to take 
it again. It would have been well if she 
had gone no further. It is idle to pass laws 
which cannot be executed ; but it was the 
will and custom that every important act 
of Parliament passed in England should be 



Fronde s Lectures. 



51 



passed in the Irish Parliament also. It 
was thought probable if a difference was 
made it would give the English Catholics a 
ground for complaining. So the English 
liturgy and prayer-book were formally 
extended to Ireland, the Mass was pro- 
hibited, and the service of the Established 
Church was set up in its place. That was 
the law, but what was the execution of it? 
At the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, it 
was not executed at all, and there was not 
the slightest attempt to do it. Nine-tenths 
of the Bishops refused to take the oath. 
She removed two of them, and left all the 
rest to govern their dioceses in their own 
way. Having established Protestantism, 
she ought to have sent over Protestant 
clergymen and a handful of Protestant 
colonists, but she did nothing of the kind. 
For appearance' sake, she had a Protestant 
law, but left it to be laughed at like boys 
at a scare-crow. Money Elizabeth was 



52 Fronde s Lectures. 

exceedingly chary of giving to any pur- 
pose. Thus Ireland was abandoned to 
anarclry. Enough had been done to exas- 
perate the Catholics ; nothing had been 
done to weaken them. Elizabeth ordered 
her viceroys to avoid exciting the pre- 
judices of the people — to keep things 
smooth. So fearful was she of giving 
offence that for the first thirty years of her 
reign she did not establish Protestant 
schools in the country. In fact, she showed 
that she was afraid to meddle with Popery. 
She wished, like her father, to reform 
Ireland, to put down murder, and establish 
law, order, and security. For all those 
years, the English garrison in Ireland 
rarely exceeded 1,500 men, and she pro- 
voked resistance by her apparently weak 
force. Why was this small number of 
heretics allowed to remain in the land at all ? 
Why didn't the Irish nation, who were 
bound by no oath and no obligation, rise 



Fronde s Lectures. 53 

with their sticks and pikes — for these 
would have been sufficient — and drive 
Elizabeth's retinue of ill-clothed, ill-paid, 
and half-starved mercenaries into the sea ? 
For this reason, that Ireland was not a 
nation at all. Elizabeth understood their 
nature only too well. She knew that they 
hated each other too cordially to unite 
against her in defence either of religion or 
country ; that there was a cheap and easy 
way to manage them by turning their 
swords against one another. According to 
the English Constitution, there was no 
standing army and no organized police. 
It was mockery to extend such a system 
to Ireland. Elizabeth ought to have 
established a force there answerable only 
to the viceroy, to enforce law and establish 
order. Four thousand men distributed 
in garrisons would have been sufficient, 
and the most honorable course in the long 
run would have been the cheapest. 



54 Fronde s Lectures. 

But Elizabeth fell back on the Constitu- 
tion. The loyal part should keep in order 
the disloyal part. She pitted the chiefs 
one against another. In fact, a great Irish 
leader becoming dangerous, she bribed a 
neighbor to make war upon him, with the 
promise of his land. The result was per- 
fectly horrible. The forty-five glorious 
years of Elizabeth were to Ireland years of 
unremitting wretchedness. 

Where was then the Irish heart that 
beats ever so true to the cause of Ireland's 
liberty? Where was it? Let the echoes 
answer in the war-shrieks of the Irish clans. 
Alas ! for Ireland. She has many times 
been found ready to betray her comrades, 
and England never knew the plan of hiring 
one to betray another fail. A terrible 
record of blood and suffering follows. Mo- 
thers and their children perished with hun- 
ger, if not by the sword. And Elizabeth 
wished no harm. She did not wish to 



Fronde s Lectures. 55 

hurt a single Irish person for its own sake. 
Englishmen undertook to settle in the 
country to keep the peace. Elizabeth 
would not hear of it, because she said she 
would not countenance what she called 
spoliation, and so the murdering went on. 
The English soldiery, their garrisons too 
scanty to take prisoners, finally came to 
look upon their enemies as wild beasts 
which they were entitled to exterminate. 

The reign of Queen Elizabeth was termi- 
nated by one of the most magnanimous 
acts of her life. The question of strength 
between the two countries had now been 
tried. Three times Ireland had resolved to 
shake off the English yoke. Three times 
she had failed, and now she lay panting and 
exhausted ; but the problem of a final set- 
tlement was as far off as ever. To govern 
Ireland required a force of sufficient 
strength to keep the peace, and for such a 
state of affairs there was no provision made 



56 Fronde s Lectures. 

in the English Constitution. If Ireland 
was ever to be identified with England, if 
the two islands were ever to be linked to- 
gether in one common unity of purpose, 
there was only one expedient by which 
such a thing could be brought about. Ire- 
land must be colonized by men of another 
race and of another creed on whom Eng- 
land could rely. Not men like the Nor- 
mans, but men who would themselves set 
an example of industry, and introduce new 
habits. The chance to bring about what I 
may call this new reformation offered soon 
after Elizabeth's death. The Catholics had 
everywhere believed that James Stuart was 
at heart one of themselves, and that as soon 
as he became King of England he would 
proclaim his Catholic tendencies. James 
had a shrewd Scotch head on his shoul- 
ders. He had wit enough to see which 
way the stream was running. The English 
Catholics in their disappointment set Guy 



Fronde s Lectures. 57 

Fawkes to blow him up. Ireland, though 
still feeble and convalescing from her last 
overthrow, raised her hand and struck a 
weak and unavailing blow. Six of the best 
counties in the North were declared for- 
feited, and 10,000 Scotch and English fami- 
lies were carried over to till the virgin soil 
which until that hour had scarcely been 
scratched by plough or spade since the 
waters of the Deluge. 

Such was the beginning of Ireland's 
troubles. The Irish had ever been the 
owners of their own soil, and it was a hard, 
cruel thing to strip them of their habita- 
tions and turn them naked into the forests. 
At that time, there was not more than 
600,000 people in Ireland, and there was no 
room for the new colonists. Old Ulster, 
the centre of this colonization system, and 
the point where it received its first practi- 
cal benefits, was the garden spot of the pro- 
vinces. For thirty years, Ireland had an era 



58 JFroudes Lectures. 

of peace. The Irish race was exhausted by 
its struggle. Further Protestant immi- 
grants streamed in. The Irish peasants 
who were aliens lived side by side, ex- 
changed hospitalities, and intermarried 
among those who had preserved their 
lands, holding them by English tenure, 
recognizing the value of industry in the 
other settlers, and preferred them as ten- 
ants to their own people. A second Pat- 
rick in the form of Protestantism had com- 
pelled it to be done. 

The Reformation, however complete, 
had left on one side a great Church estab- 
lishment, with archbishops and bishops for 
its chief ministers, and on the other side a 
crown and aristocracy for its support ; and 
still again, on another side, a great English 
nation which was Protestant in heart as 
well as in name. Where Romanism was 
overthrown, there remained another power 
in a contest which was to be wasred be- 



\ 

Fronde s Lectures. 59 

tween what was called divine right and the 
principles of justice and truth — the high 
doctrines of which brought the Earl of 
Strafford and Charles the Second to the 
scaffold. This new settlement in Ulster 
was Calvinistic. In 1636, Sir Thomas 
Wentworth, better known as the Earl of 
Strafford, was sent there as an exile. Straf- 
ford was two men in one. He was the de- 
voted servant of the monarchy and the em- 
bodiment of the spirit that was arising in 
England, and yet a clear-headed statesman 
who knew that anarchy in Ireland could 
only be held in check by English reforma- 
tion. He saw the value of the Ulster set- 
tlement, much as he disliked to respect the 
materials of which it was composed. He 
proposed to make another settlement — an 
English settlement in the province of Kil- 
gore, which he had hopes would contain 
more loyal elements. He wished to 
strengthen the English colon)', but he 



60 Fronde's Lectures. 

assisted his friends the bishops in imprison- 
ing the Presbyterians, and the result of this 
policy was to make deadly enemies of 
them. In 1639, Scotland made the first 
move in the great civil war against the 
king. 

This brings us to the event of the Irish 
Rebellion of 1641. The picture is so horri- 
ble that it is only necessary to glance at its 
leading features ; but in passing I must ask 
you to attend for a moment to a sketch of 
the different parties into which the Irish 
population was at this time divided. Im- 
migration and peace had in fifty years 
nearly trebled the Irish population. Sir 
William Betty, who is a most excellent au- 
thority, claims that in 1641 there were 
nearly a million and a half of people in Ire- 
land — 1,200,000 Catholics, 300,000 Protest- 
ants. Of the Protestants, 200,000 were in 
Ulster, and they were chiefly Nonconform- 
ists. The other 100,000 were English 



Fronde s Lectures. 61 

gentlemen with their servants, dependants, 
their friends, and those who had settled 
around them, and were chiefly what we 
call Cavaliers. There was also another 
class, descendants of the Norman conquer- 
ors. They were Catholics, and had trav- 
elled as noblemen in England and on the 
Continent, recognizing the spirit of the 
English institutions. They wished to see 
the English Reformation destroyed, and 
Ireland relapse into anarchy. Such men 
as these wished only to see the Catholic 
religion re-established, and in other respects 
that the country should continue as before 
the Reformation. In English questions, 
they were on the side of the king, and 
were ever ready to assist him against the 
Long Parliament. The second class of the 
Catholics was opposed to a junction with 
the old Irish settlers who in their own view 
were the real owners of the land and the 
rulers of the count r v. If the further view 



62 Fronde s Lectures. 

is taken that there was no longer an Eng- 
lish force in Ireland that could be relied 
upon, because every soldier was called 
home to the civil war, and that every man 
looked to the sword as the only means left 
to settle the difficulty, you have the mate- 
rials of that wild confusion that ruined the 
peace of the country and distracted the 
people. 

The Catholic element in the Irish Parlia- 
ment had determined to take possession of 
the government. They held private meet- 
ings among themselves to ascertain what 
use they should make of the power that 
they had given to it. Opinions differed. 
The more moderate proposed that they 
should declare in Parliament for Charles 
I. against the Puritans, settle the admin- 
istration in Dublin in the king's name, 
depose the Puritan authorities, and then 
send a force into England to act with 
the Royalist army. In addition, the Irish 



Fronde s Lectures. 63 

conceived that it would be very foolish to 
throw away an opportunity which might 
never return. If they took the king's side, 
and the king got the better of the Parlia- 
ment, the best they could expect would be 
to be governed by the same parliamentary 
construction. 

They might perhaps recover their reli- 
gion, but not the land in the six counties 
which had been taken from them ; and, that 
English encroachment of the soil might 
still continue, they shook themselves free, 
and took the reigns into their own hands. 
I have spoken of the horrible massacres of 
the native Irish during the reign of Eliza- 
beth. In my reading of history, one tre- 
mendous phenomenon for ever forces itself 
upon my mind, and that is that every 
political crime or the payment of every 
farthing, with compound interest, is de- 
manded by justice when the bill is sent in 
to the person representing the criminal. 



64 Fronde s Lectures. 

It is not those who commit the crime who 
are generally to suffer for it. It falls on 
others who are innocent, and this has been 
so from the beginning of time in all the 
great miseries of the provincial govern- 
ments of the world. I cannot precisely 
understand it, but there is one important 
lesson which we may draw from this great 
historical precedent. It is this : the man 
who will do a wrong if he thinks that the 
risk is his own and he only will be held 
answerable will think more gravely over 
it if he knows that he will escape scot-free, 
and that the baneful effects of his evil deed 
will fall upon unborn generations. Sir 
John Hawkins would never have gone into 
the slave trade if he could have looked 
forward and seen Gettysburg. I believe 
he would have scuttled his ships, and sunk 
them in mid-ocean. At the outbreak of 
the Rebellion in 1641, the Irish race did not, 
so far as we can understand, contemplate 



Fronde s Lectures. 65 



first any tolerable murder. They looked 
upon the settlers as robbers. They intend- 
ed to dispossess them of all the wealth 
they had acquired, and to send them back 
naked to the sea. Each Protestant's house, 
on the morning of October 23, was sur- 
rounded by armed gangs. Men, women, 
and children were seized, and stripped 
naked to their skins, and turned out in the 
wild autumn weather, to make their way 
as they could, in that condition, to the 
nearest port. Neighbor turned against 
neighbor — servant against employer. The 
valet who had undressed his master over 
night was at his bedside with a pike when 
he awoke in the morning. Churches were 
burned, crops were destroyed, and cattle 
were killed and left on the fields as carrion. 
First Ulster suffered, and, in a few weeks, 
the entire island was covered with miser- 
able crowds, famished and wretched, hunt- 
ed along the road by fierce and desperate 



66 Fronde s Lectures. 

men. So sudden, so overwhelming was 
the convulsion that, for the first day or 
two, there was no respect for the blood 
shed. Saxons and Scots suffered alike. 
Fighting" brought on murder, murder mas- 
sacre, and massacre was followed by further 
massacre. The Long Parliament at West- 
minster soon rang with the story that 
150,000 Protestants had been deliberately 
murdered in cold blood. 

Later writers now treat the massacre of 
1641 as the creation of pure imagination. 
Impartial investigators generally find the 
truth between the extremes, and Sir Wil- 
liam Petty, one of the most cool and dis- 
passionate of men, states the number killed 
in the rebellion to have been 38,000. Look- 
ing at the matter as we are now able to 
do, we can see in this outburst of frenzy 
the natural retribution of offended justice. 
The English Government were conscious 
that they had done no harm to Ireland. 



Fronde's Lectures. 



6 7 



The ^tyranny of the Earl of Strafford had 
formed one of the greatest questions in the 
prosecution which ended in his execution. 
In 1641, as I said, there were a million and 
a half of people in Ireland. In 1650, there 
were not 900,000. More than one-half of 
the population in those nine years had 
been destroyed by sword and famine. 
What the sufferings were in detail it is too 
easy to conjecture, but observe what hap- 
pened after this bloody strife. Oliver 
Cromwell landed in Dublin in 1649 ; he 
brought with him some 14,000 men, foot 
and horse, which, together with the garri- 
son at Dublin, made a total force of 18,000 
men to operate against 200,000, and not a 
fortress, not a trench, for protection. The 
speaker continued in an eloquent manner, 
describing the operations of Cromwell, and 
in conclusion, in speaking of Ireland's 
troubles, said : " What is the explanation ? 
The Irish rebellions from first to last are 



68 Fronde s Lectures. 

made of loud promises and vain perform- 
ances. They flame up like straw, and like 
straw, after it has been blazed, they go out 
in dust and ashes." , 



Froudes Third Lecture. 



DELIVERED OCTOBER 21, 1872. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

My last lecture ended with an account 
of the rise, the consequence, and the col- 
lapse of the great Irish Rebellion of 1641. 
It commenced with massacre, and it ended 
in ruin. For nine years the Irish leaders 
held the destinies of their country in their 
own hands. These were years of anarchy 
and mutual slaughter. A third of the 
population perished in the most piteous 
misery. The heaviest suffering fell upon 
the innocent peasantry, their wives and 
little ones. Had the Rebellion been 



jo Fronde s Lectures. 

sustained by an honest determination to be 
free, had the Irish nation been purifying 
itself in that furnace of calamity, when the 
clouds cleared off had there been seen a 
liberated people standing erect amid the 
ruins of their homes, the price would not 
have been too much for the admission of 
one more free commonwealth among the 
nations of the world. The curtain rose 
on a far different spectacle. Ireland, with 
its chiefs and its armies, its patriotic heroes 
and its devotees, lay prostrate at the feet 
of a few thousand English Puritans. What 
was to be done with it ? I ask you, gentle- 
men, with an experience of two centuries 
of progress and enlightenment to guide 
anew, what would you have had Cromwell 
do? Will you say that he should have 
proclaimed a universal amnesty, and have 
bidden the Irish decide upon their own 
destiny? They would have voted by 
enormous majorities for the objects the\ 



Froudes Lectures. 



n 



lad sought and failed to gain by arms, 
rhey would have bidden the English and 
Scotch colonists to have simply taken 
themselves away, and to have left Ireland 
:o her own people. 

: The English, you may say, had no busi- 
ness there. It was too late to raise 
questions of that kind. Ireland had form- 
ed part of the dominions of England. I 
will not say how it had come about. 
England 120 years before had shaken off 
the Papal authority. The Popes had 
levied war upon their devoted subjects, as 
they were pleased to call all Protestant 
states. They had used the swords of 
Spain and Austria to force them back into 
submission, and the reek of slaughtered 
men had gone up from hundreds of battle- 
fields. It had pleased Ireland in this war 
to take the Italian side. She had made her 
provinces for centuries the theatre of 
desperate insurrection. Had she succeeded 



72 Fronde s Lectures. 

in establishing her independence, she 
would have still been a thorn in England's 
side. Had Elizabeth left her to herself, 
it would have been but for the French 
and Spaniards to come in ; and, closed 
around with hostile arms, and with hostile 
nations on either side of her, England, and 
the cause for which England was fighting, 
would have come to an inglorious end. It 
could not be, and the resolution once 
formed that Ireland, whether she would or 
not, must remain attached to England, 
and the rest had followed as out of 
necessity. We must look at the position 
as men, and not as dreamers and enthu- 
siasts. 

What was Cromwell to do ? I will tell 
you what he did, and you shall judge for 
yourself whether he did ill. The Irish 
demanded liberty of conscience. " I med- 
dle with no man's conscience," the Lord 
Protector answered ; " but if you mean by 



Fronde s Lectures. 



73 



liberty of conscience liberty to have the 
Mass, that will not be suffered where the 
Parliament of England has power." "Mon- 
strous!" you may say. Well, gentlemen, I 
suppose it will be easy for me to utter 
some commonplaces on the beauties of 
liberty of conscience. Speaking here in 
this place, before the freest people in the 
world, and speaking of a subject on which 
the English people are more sensitive than 
perhaps on any other subject, at this time 
I cannot utter those words. Before I de- 
nounce a great man like Cromwell, I must 
be sure that either you or I would have 
acted more wisely or generously under the 
same circumstances. 

The Mass, as we know it, is the sacred 
rite of a religion which is one of many 
modes, and one of the oldest, and in some 
respects the most beautiful modes, of wor- 
shipping our common Maker. It has bor- 
rowed one precious jewel from the coronet 



74 Fronde s Lectures. 

of its adversary, for it has learned to re- 
spect the rights of conscience in others, 
and in learning that it has parted with the 
single element which made it an object of 
dread to others. In itself, the Catholic 
creed has been and is the belief of some of 
the noblest men who have done honor to 
humanity. 

But this is not the creed which Crom- 
well refused to tolerate. The Mass, as he 
knew it, was a system which, wherever it 
had power, was at that moment punishing 
by sword and by fire every deviation from 
its own ordinances. It had made Germany 
a charnel-house ; Ireland it had plunged 
into unutterable woe. I will not pro- 
nounce whether Cromwell did right or 
wrong ; but this I know, that, if we or our 
fathers had been struggling in a death- 
wrestle for a century with such a spirit, we 
should not hesitate, if the chance was in 
our power, to stop the fountain from which 



Froudes Lectures. 



75 



those waters of bitterness were flowing". 
Had Cromwell's policy toward Ireland 
been persevered in as a whole, I believe I 
should not be here addressing you on any 
questions of difference between England 
and Ireland. We had formed a design for 
the pacification of that country which 
would have made future trouble there im- 
possible. 

The Ulster settlers who had been driven 
out on the first rising, and all other English 
and Irish owners who had stood by the 
English Parliament throughout the war, 
were replaced in their estates. All the 
other Irish landholders had been engaged 
in the war against England, and the lands 
of these were declared confiscated. The 
honest peasantry who possessed any real 
right in their farms by having performed 
honest labor openly were protected, sub- 
ject only to the condition to be obedient to 
the new government ; but noble lords and 



76 Froudes Lectures. 

gentlemen whose trade was fighting, who 
had called themselves lords of the soil, and 
as such had maintained themselves by poor 
men's industry, were, by one huge sweep, 
dispossessed. They were not driven out 
of Ireland altogether, nor left without 
means of support if they chose to exert 
themselves. Of the four districts of Ire- 
land, one was still to be theirs. The great 
province of Connaught was assigned to the 
gentry as exclusively their own. As the 
Saxon conquerors of England drove the 
Britons into Wales, so Cromwell pushed 
the fighting Irishmen into Connaught. In 
the rest of Ireland he planted the army 
who had conquered it. 

Each soldier had his lot assigned to 
him. If he wished to return home he 
would sell it to another Englishman, who 
would be ready to take it. Many Pro- 
testant families were distributed over the 
land, to promote industry and order. The 



Fronde s Lectures. 



77 



reformed religion was made a reality. 
Flemings and Huguenots, all were welcom- 
ed, and all were encouraged to bring with 
them their trades and occupations. Pre- 
ceding settlers had introduced manufac- 
tures into Ireland, and they had built 
ships and begun to trade. Commercial 
jealousy had taken the alarm in England. 
These short-sighted, fantastic, absurd, and 
iniquitous laws Cromwell tore up by the 
roots. He saw no justice in Irish indus- 
try's feeding the pockets of English manu- 
facturers. He saw, if Ireland should be- 
come a full partner in England's prosperity, 
the fiction of a separate interest and sepa- 
rate nationality ought to come to an end. 
He abolished the Irish Parliament. Ire- 
land was incorporated into England, and 
made part of it, and her towns and counties 
sent their representatives to Westminster, 
Thus were the elements of mischief swept 
out of the way, and a new and wholesome 



78 Fronde s Lectures. 

stock of energetic Protestants planted in 
her soil, with a full and free participation 
in every benefit which England possessed. 
Cromwell bade Ireland turn a fresh leaf in 
her tragical history, and enter upon a 
career of honesty and prosperity. We 
call all this tyranny from our modern point 
of view. We must look facts in the face 
and not be frightened by words. In fifteen 
years, the three provinces which were thus 
treated had grown from a wilderness into 
a garden. Bogs were drained and planted 
with trees; dwelling-houses sprang up; 
fields were fenced up; ships came back to 
the harbors ; life and property were made 
secure ; and the Irish peasant and farmer, 
under the rule of the Cromwellians, lived 
side by side, each adding to the other's 
welfare. 

Enough of Cromwell. I, as an English- 
man, honor him and glory in him as the 
greatest statesman and the greatest soldier 



Fronde's Lectures. 



79 



that our race has produced. What is more, 
gentlemen, I consider him to have been 
the best friend, in the best sense,of_£he 
people of Ireland.^ The Restoration came. 
The Stuarts were brought back, and with 
the Stuarts came the old story of com- 
promises and half measures. The Irish 
Parliament was at once set up again. 
The Irish expected that Cromwell's soldiers 
would be expelled ; that the confiscated 
estates would be restored to their owners. 
England was content to weaken the Pro- 
testants without conciliating the Catholics. 
Something over one-third of the lands was 
restored. The Connaught plan was aban- 
doned now ; exiled Irishmen were allowed 
to return to their homes. Two-thirds 
of the land was left with the Cromwellians, 
and old rivals were once more left face 
to face, with animosities deepened a 
thousand-fold. The Episcopal Church was 
re-established. It suited as ill the Irish 



80 Fronde s Lectures. 

Protestants as it suited the Scotch Presby- 
terians. The latter set up their kirk ; the 
Irish Protestants were less fortunate. 

The archbishops and bishops were re- 
placed in their dioceses. To counterbal- 
ance them, the Catholics were allowed to 
establish a rival hierarchy. The Catholic 
Primate was received in state at Dublin. 
For the Protestant Nonconformists, mean- 
while, there was no mercy. They were 
assumed to be republicans, and repub- 
licans, just then, were looked upon as 
venomous reptiles. The Northern Presby- 
terians and the Cromwellians were the 
bone and sinew of the Protestant interest. 
They were the best soldiers, the best 
farmers, the best artisans, and the best 
men of business. In all matters, secular 
and spiritual, they had the stern resolution 
which distinguished Calvinism ; yet it was 
thought wise to let the bishops persecute 
these men. Their chapels and schools 



Fronde s Lectures. 8 1 

were closed, their ministers were enjoined, 
and it was a turning-point in the history 
of the country. The proudest and bravest 
of the Puritan colonists sold their allotments, 
and bade Ireland a stern farewell. They had 
given their blood in vain. Kings and priests 
had come back again, and with kings and 
priests it seemed they were to have no 
abiding-place. They turned their faces 
to the setting sun, and the descendants 
of the conquerors of Ireland are now 
citizens of the United States of America. 

Gentlemen, I was once present, a few 
years ago, at a very extraordinary scene. 
It happened that there was some uncer- 
tainty as to where James VI. was buried in 
Westminster Abbey. The Dean of West- 
minster, who is my friend, had a commis- 
sion from the Secretary of State to search 
among the tombs and discover where 
James's coffin lay. It was not thought 
prudent to conduct such an investigation 



82 Fronde s Lectures. 

by daylight. It was done at night, and he 
asked me — perhaps one or two other gen- 
tlemen — to be present. We went; and 
there, by flaring torches, among those old, 
dark arches, we were probing among the 
ashes of the great dead. We looked upon 
all that remained of kings and princes and 
warriors and statesmen and prelates. We 
felt almost guilty for the liberty we were 
taking in disturbing their august repose. 
At last we came to a tomb where evidently 
some great person had once lain. At first 
we knew not what it was or who it was. 
It was the tomb of Oliver Cromwell, Lord 
Protector of England. They had taken 
him up from his tomb. They had hanged 
his body on the gallows at Tyburn, and 
had posted his head on the spire of 
Westminster Hall. They had flung out 
the Cromwellians. They had flung out 
Cromwell, and there was this sad and 
awful memorial of what has been. It 



Fronde s Lectures. 



83 



gave us thoughts which had better not 
be uttered. 

Well, gentlemen, the Cromwellians in 
Ireland were gone. Other Englishmen 
came in their place — money-makers, land- 
jobbers, and speculators. The persecution 
of the Protestants was checked after its 
first success, and the Ulster settlement con- 
tinued to prosper. But the Protestant 
colonies in the South received their death 
blow. The Catholics overspread them or 
absorbed • them. The Catholic religion 
swept back like a returning tide. James 
II. followed Charles, and James, himself a 
Catholic, lent the influence of the crown to 
the reaction. In both countries, he set him- 
self to undo the Reformation. In Ireland, he 
went to work without disguise. He placed 
Catholics in the highest offices in the state. 
He appointed Catholic judges, a Catholic 
chancellor, and Catholic magistrates, made 
the army Catholic, and expelled the Pro- 



84 Fronde's Lectures. 

testant officers. He disa med the Protests 
ant gentry, and, finally, he appointed the 
brother of the Catholic archbishop vice- 
roy. The next step was to have been the 
reversal of the land settlement, and the 
universal restoration of the Catholic pro- 
prietors. It was to have been managed 
quietly by form of law, but the English 
revolution came in the way. James abdi- 
cated and went to France, and William of 
Orange became King of England. How 
was all this to affect Ireland ? According 
to English lawyers, no act of the Irish Par- 
liament was valid which had not passed 
under the great seal of England. The 
King of England, whoever he was, was held 
to be King of Ireland also. The Irish inter- 
preted the Constitution differently. They 
insisted that, though James might have lost 
the English crown, he was still King of 
Ireland. They invited James to come to 
them, and he came. They invited Louis 



Fronde's Lectures. 



85 



XIV. to help them, and he sent money, 
5,000 men, and some of his best officers. 
The factions Cromwell had overthrown 
were once more in the possession of the 
Irish Government. It remained for them 
to accomplish at once what their grand- 
fathers had failed to do, and root up con- 
clusively and for ever the detested Pro- 
testant settlements. They called a Free 
National Parliament, and in the acts of it 
you will see an inevitable tendency of the 
English towards " home rule." They were 
perfectly natural acts. Under one con- 
dition, they were perfectly righteous acts; 
but their resolution on the field of battle 
should equal their courage in the senate- 
house. They destroyed Cromwell's plan- 
tations. They dispossessed the late colo- 
nists who had been settled on their soil as 
completely as they themselves had been. 

You may say this was right, that 
England ought to have acquiesced. I say 



86 Froudes Lectures. 

it was right with one provision — that 
Ireland was prepared to back up words 
with deeds. Where there is the question 
of the dismemberment of an empire, the 
province which aspires to a separate 
existence must have strength to take it. 
England would have been craven had 
she consented to a separation at her own 
free will which would be a death-blow 
to her own liberty. Nor was Ireland 
herself without men who would strike 
a blow for English protection and for 
their own hearths and homes. The new 
king came in person to lead the movement, 
and the work of the conquest had to be 
over again. The times had changed in 
England, and not for the better. William's 
troops were a motley compound of Dutch, 
English, Germans, and French Huguenots, 
little disciplined and dissolute. The Irish, 
on the contrary, had never been in better 
condition. They had been drilled by 



Fronde s Lectures. 87 

French officers, and were well armed and 
equipped. They were, besides, on their 
own soil, fighting- for everything they held 
most dear. Yet the result was in no way 
different from what it has always been 
under similar circumstances. At the battle 
of the Boyne, the Irish did not so much 
as make a creditable stand, but were 
beaten by their own negligence, being 
driven from a position which the most 
moderate care would have made impreg- 
nable. They fought bravely and well, but 
they stood only until the French general 
had been killed by a cannon-ball ; then 
they broke into an irretrievable route, and 
never rallied again. 

William was unwilling to follow them. 
He was tolerant. He knew little of Irish 
history, and understood little or nothing 
of the Irish people. He saw nothing but 
a high-spi'rited and unfortunate race who 
had been long misgoverned and oppressed. 



88 Froude s Lectures, 

He was anxious to quiet Ireland on any 
terms, and the easier the terms he allowed, 
the sooner he thought the work would be 
accomplished. Cromwell gave the Irish 
no submission until they had submitted ; 
William insisted upon peace while they 
were still in a condition to stipulate. The 
war ended, but it only ended in the famous 
articles of Limerick and Galway, and 
reproaches for broken faith. 

I ask, then, why was the rebellion in 
Ireland unsuccessful? I have already 
indicated the answer, but I must again 
repeat it. Because the hearts of the masses 
of the people were not in the matter. 
Never had life gone so well as under the 
reign of Cromwell. No administration 
will prosper which robs the poor and 
leaves the rich free to strain the laws 
for their own pleasure. An aristocracy 
which existed only to be a drain upon the 
resources of the country was little better 



Froude s Lectures. 89 

than a mockery and a curse. At that 
time, the Huguenots were looking to 
Ireland for a home. The Irish Catholics 
were passionately attached to France, and 
were going back to France in tens of 
thousands, and it cannot but suggest itself 
how happy it would have been for all at 
that time if there could have been no such 
population. With care and wisdom at 
such a time, it might have been done with 
the consent of all parties concerned. 
Impossible ! I believe statesmen find all 
measures impossible except those that will 
come about by themselves and without 
any care from them. 

Grant that this was impossible, then, at 
this juncture. I think the time had come 
that there should have been an end of 
penal law. I can make allowance for those 
who thought differently, for in reflecting 
moments I often think differently myself. 
I dare say after the revolution I should 



go Froude s Lectures. 

have concluded that it was impossible for 
the two religions to stay safely side by side. 
In Catholic countries, there was no tolera- 
tion for Protestants. Take human nature 
as it is, there is no great wonder that 
ordinary Protestants should have been in- 
clined to have set the example ; but all ex- 
perience had proved that penal laws could 
not have been enforced in Protestant 
countries. They were against the genius 
of free institutions. Penal laws might suit 
Spain or Italy, where they fell in with the 
opinions of all the people. I say expe- 
rience had shown that they could not have 
been carried out in Ireland. The revolu- 
tion had left the Catholics for the present 
deprived of power to hurt, and oppressive 
laws proved only a mockery and an insult. 
Religion should have been declared free. 
Their law should have been Protestant in 
return ; for, notwithstanding the bishops' 
persecutions, there were still Presbyterians. 



Fronde's Lectures. 91 

The loyalty of the Presbyterians had been 
proved in the Rebellion. 

Protestants of all persuasions should have 
been allowed to settle there, and the dis- 
abilities of the Nonconformists ought to 
have been for ever abandoned. With a 
broad platform which embraced members 
of all reformed communions, a vigorous 
system of school teaching, an influx of 
skilled artisans, and the extinction of all 
political disaffection, how different would 
have been the fate of Ireland ! 

Two considerable manufactories had 
already been established, and were thriving 
there. The linen manufacture in the North 
was Protestant. The woollen manufacture 
was spreading over the country — every 
cabin had its spinner's wheel, and every 
village in the country its hand-looms. 
Irish woollen was the very best in the 
world. Labor was cheap in Ireland, and 
the water-power unsurpassed. Assisted by 



92 Froudes Lectures. 

all these advantages, there was no telling 
what might have been the extension of this 
particular branch of industry. Mechanics, 
Scotch, English, and Dutch, and colonies 
of shipwrights, were only waiting for politi- 
cal quiet to emigrate to her borders. The 
Catholics might have been left unmolested 
for ever, and would have been, if there had 
been an assurance in the general prosperity 
of the country that the two religions would 
have lost their sectarian bitterness in com- 
mon occupation and common thriving 
labor. The Rebellion had widened the 
breach between the two creeds, and un- 
happily the manner in which it was dealt 
with made the wound incurable. 

The Catholics made a violent effort to 
recover the forfeiture of their estates, and 
according to law they were supposed to 
have forfeited also all the lands which they 
retained. The Rebellion had cost England 
£9,000,000 of money before ft was subdued. 



Fronde s Lectures. 93 

The English Parliament insisted that the 
remaining lands should be sold, and that 
the proceeds should be applied to pay the 
bill. Had this been done, there would have 
been, at any rate, none of the excuses which 
were afterward given for interfering with 
Irish trade. Industrial prosperity, at any 
rate, would have gone on undisturbed. 
Good intention in one direction and fault in 
another blighted the prospects and de- 
stroyed an opportunity which can never 
return. 

The articles of Limerick and Galway 
were adopted, and the Catholics claimed 
the same toleration which they had enjoyed 
under Charles II., and claimed that it was 
part of the conditions of the treaty that 
they were to be allowed to retain their 
estates. The estates had been actually for- 
feited ; but instead of being sold, as the 
English Parliament demanded, they were 
given away to King William's favorites, so 



94 Fronde s Lectures. 

that from this source there was no fund 
at all to pay the cost of the war. The 
English Parliament was exasperated, and 
the two branches of that old body were 
irritated by quarrels and recriminations. 
These difficulties might in time have 
quieted themselves, but unhappily every 
day and amid fresh causes of suspicion the 
question arose, Who was to be King of 
England after King William died, and 
Queen after Queen Mary ? 

England itself had had enough of the 
Stuarts, and decided for the House of Hano- 
ver. The Irish Catholics very naturally 
declared for the Pretender, and asserted that 
the Stuarts were the lawful heirs to the 
throne, while the Protestants naturally in- 
sisted that people attached to these doc- 
trines should be silenced or driven out of 
the country. This disturbing spirit was 
not confined to the Catholics, but showed 
tself among the peers and bishops of the 



Frondes Lectures. 95 

Established Church. An attempt having 
been made to assassinate King William, the 
English Parliament passed a severe act for 
the protection of the king's person. This 
act they sent over to be re-enacted by the 
Parliament in Ireland. 

At this time, woollen weaving was grow- 
ing so prosperous in Ireland that the Eng- 
lish manufacturers were trembling for their 
own supremacy. England thought of Ire- 
land only as a colony, and we all know how 
England has handled her colonies in the 
last century. Was England to be ruined 
for the sake of a miserable and troublesome 
dependency ? Her manufacturers peti- 
tioned Parliament to lay such restrictions 
upon Ireland and the Irish trade as should 
destroy that trade for ever. Parliament re- 
garded Ireland as powerless to resist, and 
the fatal laws were forced on her which at 
one swoop overwhelmed her woollen trade, 
and cut off at a single blow that great 



9& Fronde s Lectures. 

source of employment for her unhappy 
people. 

Thus was her trade struck away, and she 
was a prostrate, ruined country. Twenty 
thousand Protestant workmen immediately 
left Ireland, and either came to this coun- 
try or returned to the places from which 
they had gone out. Many more followed, 
and this sad detriment to the country was 
accelerated by another cause, which was 
scarcely less absurd and pernicious. 

The Episcopal Church had been rein- 
stated in its privileges. By the Act of 
Uniformity, no person might preach in a 
church or chapel who had not been or- 
dained by the bishops. In England, the 
law had been softened by a Toleration Act. 
In Ireland, there was no Toleration Act ; 
and, in passing, I must say I believe bish- 
ops have produced more mischief in the 
world than any other set of men. The 
bishops took upon themselves to enforce 



Froudes Lectures. 97 

the Act of Uniformity. England's arms 
had borne the brunt of the battle in the 
Rebellion, and this was their reward. The 
Irish Parliament, dismayed and distracted, 
saw no better remedy now than to recall 
the promise of toleration which had been 
made to the Catholics. 

In this emergency, England behaved 
more than cruelly, for she allowed the Irish 
Parliament to pass laws which foreshad- 
owed distress ; but the Irish judges and 
magistrates received private orders that 
the laws were not to be enforced. The 
Irish Protestants admitted the tyranny of 
these laws, and in its despair the Irish Par- 
liament appointed a commission, and Pro- 
testant Ireland prayed for admission into 
the Empire on the same occasion. She 
laid herself at the feet of Great Britain. I 
suppose that when the history of my coun- 
try is read no more unkind act can be 
found than this refusal to Ireland's request 



98 Fronde's Lectures* 

when it was presented to her in the year 
1704. But England — fifty years before, the 
England of Cromwell and of the Puritans — 
was now filled with men of money, capital- 
ists, manufacturers, and traders who have 
no interest beyond their ledgers, and 
whose political foresight looks no further 
than to the balance-sheet of the succeeding 
year; and to have admitted Ireland to the 
union would have been to admit Ireland to 
free trade. It would have been to open the 
manufactures of which England has now 
the monopoly. . Union was refused, and the 
Irish Parliament was left to find some 
other means of self-protection. 

The problem which presented itself to 
the churchmen, lay and spiritual, who ruled 
Ireland at the beginning of the century 
was at once to keep the dissenters down, 
and invent some plan which would prevent 
the further growth of Popery. An act had 
been passed in England to disable Catho- 



Fronde s Lectures. 99 

lies from purchasing inherited property in 
land. 

Now, then, what was the effect of this 
act ? The effect was to root out all moral 
principle from the middle and upper classes 
in the country. Worthless children pre- 
tended to be Protestant in order to make 
themselves independent of their parents. 
Gentlemen affected conversion that they 
might be sheriffs and magistrates, and able 
to buy a piece of land. Lawyers qualified 
themselves to be admitted to the bench and 
bar. Ireland was filled with men perjured 
to the lips to save themselves. It was 
ruled, in addition, that no one was a Pro- 
testant in the eye of the law who was not a 
member of the Established Church. Non- 
conformists had hitherto a recognized ex- 
istence ; they were liable to banishment, 
but to no special disability. Their presence 
was acknowledged by the law, but they 
were placed in the same position as a Cath- 



I oo Fronde s Lectures. 

olic. No one was allowed to serve his 
country in any capacity, except that of a 
petty constable, until he had received the 
sacrament from an ordained clergyman. 

One more touch had still to be added to 
the picture of the condition to which Ire- 
land had been reduced. The English cloth 
manufacturers possessed the monopoly of 
the European markets. The Irish weaving 
industry was at an end. The advantage of 
England lay in the quality of her wool. 
If Irish wool were mixe'd with French wool, 
the French could compete successfully 
with England. The Irish wool must be 
monopolized for the English manufacturer. 
The English Parliament passed an act that 
no Irish wool should be exported, except 
to England. England fixed the price which 
she thought it was best to pay for it. The 
French were willing to pay much more for 
it. Stringent laws were passed by which 
England thought to prevent smuggling, 



Fronde s Lectures, ioi 

Ireland's coast is very favorable for this. 
It is indented with dangerous bays navi- 
gable only by the natives. Coast-guards 
were bribed. Every one, from the lowest 
to the highest, entered into the smuggling 
trade. All of them went hand-in-hand to 
defeat English avarice and evade English 
laws. Ingenuity could not have devised a 
system better suited to the Irish tempera- 
ment. This state of things continued for 
three-quarters of a century. It was count- 
ed no sin to smuggle. A priest once con- 
sulted his bishop as to what he was to say 
to it. The bishop said that, as King George 
had no right to his crown, he certainly had 
no right to the customs duties. 

This was the condition of Ireland as she 
stood at the accession of George I., and as 
she stood until her chains were broken by 
the war with the American colonies. The 
viceroy came over to open Parliament, but 
stayed no longer. For the greater part of 



102 Fronde s Lectures. 

the time, the country was governed by the 
Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the 
House. The Peers being most of them 
absentees, the Upper House was virtually 
the House of the Bishops of the Established 
Church. 

Even with accessions, the Established 
Church amounted to no more than one- 
tenth of the population. It had the church 
revenues, and if, with these advantages, it 
made no progress, the reason is not far to 
seek. The tithes, if properly distributed, 
would have supported a clergyman in every 
parish. But some, who had interest with 
the higher authorities, held several bene- 
fices ; one had as many as sixteen. The 
country went to ruin. The bishops were 
appointed by the Crown. Some of them 
were very excellent men. Bishop Berkeley 
alone would have redeemed his order from 
obloquy. Dean Swift said: "No blame 
rests with the Court for these appointments. 



Fronde s Lectures, 103 

Excellent moral men are always selected, 
but, unfortunately, it always happens that, 
as the worthy divines cross Hounslow 
Heath to take possession of their bishop- 
rics, they are regularly robbed and mur- 
dered by highwaymen, who take their 
robes, go to Ireland, and are consecrated 
bishops in their stead." I found in Dublin 
Castle a request from a bishop for a sepa- 
rate ship for himself and his property, and 
to carry 4,000 ounces of silver plate. 

From the wreck of her trade, the linen 
manufacture escaped. Ulster was allowed 
to retain its trade, and with it its Presby- 
terian Church, but the inhabitants also 
retained great indignation at the way their 
religion was treated. The rest of the 
countiw was left to the Parliament of Ire- 
land, which I have described, and by which 
and under which was formed the extra- 
ordinary race of modern Irishmen with 
whom we are familiar. Her state had no 



104 Froudes Lectures 

longer any attraction for men of intellect. 
Noble men and men of fortune lived on the 
continent. They leased their lands to 
middlemen on easy terms, and asked no 
questions so long as their rent was paid. 
The lease-holder desired to be an easy 
gentleman too. He was as much a Pro- 
testant as any one. His creed was that of 
his forefathers — that labor was dishonor- 
able. So he underlet the land to men like 
himself, who again underlet the property 
Sometimes there were half a dozen men 
holding leases of the same estate. AH these 
so-called gentry were living beyond their 
means, eating, drinking — especially the 
drinking — horse-racing, and borrowing 
money. Under this cursed system, the 
Irish people rather starved than lived, and 
then we quarrel with them for being im- 
provident and discontented. Never have 
any people been so used ; first plundered 
violently by their agents, they were then 



Fronde s Lectures. 105 

plundered by form of law. Except during 
the short interval of Puritan rule, the dogs 
were treated better than the poor Irish. 
The prime fault rests with the English. 
They took possession of Ireland for their 
own purposes, and they must answer for 
their injustice. The Irish middlemen must 
bear their share of the blame. The Eng- 
lish agents would have left a peasant a few 
rags, but the Irish middlemen would have 
only left him his bones. The curse was 
too much liberty ; not too much for the 
poor, but too much for the rich. Lord 
Donegal once plundered his tenants so, 
ruling 6,000 people, that a cry of indigna- 
tion went to the ears of the viceroy. The 
viceroy, judging from what he said about 
it privately, would have been glad to hang 
Lord Donegal. But the law did not allow 
the promotion of a noble lord in such a 
style, and the 6,000 people, all Protestants, 
all came to England. Every man kept his 



io6 Fronde s Lectm es. 

household armed. Half the county of 
Kerry was ruled over for many years by 
Donald Mahoney and his fairies. Donald 
was head tenant of some lord who lived in 
England. His fairies were 4,000 tenants, in 
white sheets and blackened faces, -whose 
business was to see that no unwelcome 
person set foot in Killarney. He be- 
queathed his best blue breeches to his 
daughter as the best man in Kerry. 

Private wars were over, but faction rights 
had taken their place. The black-thorn 
had superseded the battle-axe, and it had 
this advantage, that the beaten might not 
be murdered entirely. Duelling became so 
prevalent that it was proposed at last to 
make the survivor pay for the support of 
his late adversary's family. When a new 
secretary came over from. England, he had 
to be proved by standing are. At one 
time, a new secretary came over, and an 
opposition member of Parliament soon 



Fronde s Lectures. 107 

picked a quarrel with him. They met in 
Phoenix Park. The secretary fired in the 
air. The member then took deliberate aim, 
but his pistol missed fire. He cocked it 
again, and again it missed fire. The secre- 
tary bowed and said, " There appears to 
be something the matter with your flint." 
That was fixed, but again it missed fire. 
The secretary remarked, " I think you 
had better change your flint.'' It was 
changed, and this time he had better 
success, and the ball went through his 
opponent's hat. The secretary was going 
to fire in the air again, but the member in- 
sisted that he should shoot at him, and that 
a refusal would be an affront. It was 
finally settled, after some words, and they 
shook hands. This was the most popular 
secretary that ever held office in Ireland. 

Where was the Irish Parliament of this 
time ? It was sitting regularly ; it met at 
alternate years, and voted supplies ; but the 



108 Fronde s Lectures. 

Irish Parliament was managed, too. Half 
the revenue of Ireland was settled regu- 
larly on the Crown, and the Crown claimed 
the distribution of it. Out of these funds, 
when political matters were more quiet, 
were provided pensions for the mistresses 
of the Georges. As the Irish Parliament 
grew more troublesome, the money was 
applied to purposes of political corruption. 
When a man would get annoying, the 
viceroy would send privately to him, and 
tell him that if he held his tongue he might 
make something by it. The larger traitors 
were corrupted with positions ; and sine- 
cure offices were created for others. 

There is a treacherous motive manifested 
in the usage that Ireland has undergone at 
the hands of England, her mother country. 
1 did not mention to you what action the 
English Parliament took in regard to this 
question, and before bringing this speech to 
a close I will do so. Instead of sanctioning 



Froudes Lectures. log 

the requests that were constantly and im- 
peratively made by these would-be Irish 
noblemen, chancellors, and lords, they were 
considerably modified, so that several dema- 
gogues who were seeking to despoil their 
own country by occupying high positions 
at the expense of the Irish people were 
disappointed. In 1782, one of the Boyles 
had gathered within himself hopes of 
achieving patriotic distinction, and mani- 
fested to Parliament his desire to be made 
a chancellor, the perquisites of the office 
being something over £2,000 per year. 

Rebellious in 1798, these people, who 
were desirous of distinction, sent a son of 
Healy Hutchinson — one of Ireland's ablest 
statesmen — to Parliament with a petition 
asking that a number of his friends be giv- 
en office, the object being to ascertain if 
England was willing to offer bribes suffi- 
cient to induce the Irish counsellors to 
desert their clients, the Irish public. To 



_L 



no Frondes Lectures. 

show you how modest this request was, I 
will state that the conditions under which 
these Irish partisan patriots — the counsel- 
ors — offered to abandon their country's 
service were that Lord Shannon should 
Up made Lord Chancellor ; that two sons 
of Healy Hutchinson — the champion of 
Irish liberty — be made viscounts ; and that 
Hutchinson's wife be made a viscountess 
for life. Lord Shelburne, in behalf of Par- 
liament, stated to the petitioners that this, 
although it might seem to those interested 
a very trivial matter, involved many ques- 
tions of rights which the English Govern- 
ment was bound to respect, and reminded 
the overzealous gentlemen that the major- 
ity rule was a good one. 

It was, in short, a petition which would 
have deprived many of the Irish people of 
their right to act, if, indeed, Parliament 
ever recognized that right. Not only 
would it have subjected them to still great- 



Fronde s Lectures. 1 1 1 

er tyranny, but it would have taken the 
precedence of other and perhaps better 
laws which might thereafter have been 
enacted. It provided for the support of 
Mealy Hutchinson and his friends, at an 
annual expense to the English Government 
of over $3,000,000. And now the question 
recurs, Where would this money come 
from? I will tell you. It would come 
from the hard toil of the poor Irish pea- 
sants, and there is where most of the 
money has come from that has in past 
years supported these Irish aristocrats. 

It is said that no one in this present age 
can realize what hardships and sufferings 
these oppressed people of Ireland have un- 
dergone in times past ; and, judging from 
what we know of the reign of tyranny 
there one hundred years ago, we can hard- 
ly say that it would be difficult to imagine 
such outrageous proceedings on the part 
of England, looking at her as she is to-dav. 



1 1 2 Fronde s Lectures. 

It is now becoming- common for people to 
think that corruption is very essential to 
good government, and, looking at it from 
the standing-point of late customs, I should 
say it was. At least it seems as if this 
peculiar phase of political life was creeping 
into every kind of government. And now 
the matter is reduced to this proposition : 
We must either have liberty, and cast out 
corruption; or have corruption, and cast 
out liberty. 



Froudfs Fourth Lecture. 



DELIVERED OCTOBER 23, 1872. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

I have described to you the principles 
of government which prevailed in Ireland 
during the greater part of the last century. 
We have no right to be surprised that the 
result was not satisfactory. The natural 
remedy was revolution, and, if the Irish 
could have made revolution, had they pos- 
sessed sufficient unity of purpose, sufficient 
national virtue, sufficient patriotism in the 
proper sense of the word to have risen up 
and sworn that they would end their ser- 
vitude or all die, the whole world would 



U4 Froudes Lectures. 

have clapped their hands and cried out 
that it was well done ; but, whether people 
are strong enough to make revolutions or 
not, the laws under which society is al- 
lowed to exist do not fail in one way or 
another to punish injustice. Misgovern- 
ment, like curses, always comes home to 
roost. What Ireland could not accomplish 
for herself America accomplished for her. 
For a centur}' and a half the stream of 
Protestant emigrants had set steadily from 
the shores of Ireland to America. The 
Cromweliians, the Scotch and English Cal- 
vinists, the artisans and mechanics, the mis- 
sionaries of industry and reformation who 
had been planted in the Isle at lucid inter- 
vals of statesmanship, had been driven out 
by the restraints of government and the 
pedantry of Episcopalianism. They had 
come to America in the same way, against 
the mother country, which the Catholic 
peasantry come now. They had brought 



Fronde s Lectures. 115 

with them a consciousness of wrong, and 
waited only to pay England for her treat- 
ment of them. 

A century waned. Irish society began 
to show symptoms of uneasy forces work- 
ing within it. South and North there were 
risings of the peasantry. The behavior of 
the poor starving creatures was at first 
most creditable to them. They tore down 
fences. They hunted cattle over the coun- 
try, but to human life there was little inju- 
ry or none. They petitioned only to be 
allowed to keep their little farms on terms 
not wholly ruinous to them, and the Eng- 
lish viceroys allowed that never had people 
a greater justification for revolt. Allow 
me to say they had a very great many 
more wrongs to complain of at the time 
than had America at the time she asserted 
her own independence. Lord Townsend, 
who was Viceroy in Ireland, in a dispatch 
to the Home Government, drew a graphic 



n6 Frondes Lectures, 

picture of the landlord's tyranny. But, of 
course, there was no redress. A constitu- 
tional government could act only by Parlia- 
ment, and Parliament law at that time was, 
unfortunately, the landlords' law. The year 
before the tea had been sent floating in 
Boston Harbor, the Ulster grandees had 
sent out a contingent of exasperated emi- 
grants unusually numerous. The Ulster 
linen manufacture had been developed by 
the skill and industry of the Presbyterians. 
Compared with the Southern provinces, 
Ulster was a garden. Land had increased 
greatly in value. Capital made in trade 
had been sunk in the soil, and educated, 
.enterprising peasantry had converted bog 
and mountain into corn and flax fields. 
The noble lords to whom a large part of 
these lands belonged, as it was called, who 
had never, perhaps, so much as cast their 
eyes on the surface of their property, con- 
cluded that the increased value did not be- 



Frondes Lectures. nj 

long to the tenants who had created it, but 
to themselves who had allowed it to be 
created. As leases fell in, they demanded 
enormous fines before they would renew 
them, or rents which could not possibly be 
paid. They served ejectments without a 
scruple. Families which had been a hun- 
dred years upon the soil, chiefly Protes- 
tants, were turned adrift. These were 
made homeless and houseless, and were 
robbed — for no other word can be used 
about it — by those who ought to have been 
their natural protectors. 

Most, if not all, of these poor people 
came off to New England. In the whole 
number there was probably not a man who 
could draw trigger or carry a knapsack 
that did not try to clear scores with the 
representatives of England in the War of 
Independence. Nor, as I told you in my 
first lecture, were the arms of these exiles 
the sole auxiliaries which the Irish contri- 



1 1 8 Fronde s Lectures, 

buted to the American cause. The entire 
Protestant population left in Ireland, ex- 
cept that portion belonging to the Estab- 
lished Church and the landed gentry, saw 
that the American cause was their own, 
and in their hearts did what lay in them to 
further American success. 

There is no occasion for me to say any- 
thing of the relation which now exists be- 
tween the Irish Catholics and the American 
people ; the generous hospitality which 
America extended to them in their dis- 
tress ; the affectionate and grateful hope 
with which in the old country they look to 
America. So deep is that feeling upon 
both sides now that I am rather bound to 
insist on the bonds now forgotten which 
once existed between America and the 
Irish Protestants. Whatever difference of 
opinion may now be entertained here on 
these Irish questions, there was a time 
when the Irish Protestants were nearer to 



Frondes Lectures. 119 

America in heart and in sentiment than the 
Catholics. As this statement of mine has 
been loudly questioned, I shall prove what 
I say. 

You must allow me to read an address 
to you from the leading Catholics of Ireland 
to the Irish Secretary, in the momentous 
year of 1775. It was signed by many of 
the Catholic nobility, and purports, as you 
see, to represent the feeling of the whole 
Catholic community. 

" Sir (so it runs) : We flatter ourselves 
that the occasion, the motives, and your 
goodness will engage you to excuse this 
trouble. As we are informed that an 
intended subscription among his majesty's 
affectionate, loyal, and dutiful Roman 
Catholic subjects of the kingdom of 
Ireland to raise a fund among ourselves to 
be employed to encourage recruits to 
enlist for his majesty's service was never 
judged necessary by the Government ; yet 



120 Frondes Lectures. 

being desirous to give every assistance 
in our power, and to give every proof of 
our sincere affection and grateful attach- 
ment to the most sacred person and 
Government of the best of kings ; and 
justly abhorring the unnatural rebellion 
which has lately broken out among some 
of his American subjects against his 
majesty's most sacred person and Govern- 
ment ; impressed with a deep sense of our 
duty and allegiance ; and feeling ourselves 
loudly called upon by every motive and 
every tie that can affect the hearts of good 
and loyal subjects, we take the liberty to 
make on this interesting occasion an hum- 
ble tender of our duty and affection to our 
good and gracious king ; and we hum- 
bly presume to lay at his feet 2,000,- 
000 of loyal, faithful, and affectionate 
hearts and hands, unarmed indeed, but 
zealous, ready, and desirous to exert them- 
selves strenuously in defence of his majesty 



Fronde's Lectures. 121 

against all his enemies of what denomina- 
tion whatever, in any part of the world 
wherever they may be ; and to exert in an 
active manner the loyalty and obedience 
which has always been with them unan- 
imous, constant, and unalterable," etc., etc. 

This remarkable address might tempt 
English administrators less virtuous than 
Mr. Gladstone to reconsider their policy 
towards the Irish Catholics. Eighty years 
of penal laws had produced this passionate 
devotion to the "best of kings." Seventy 
years had followed of apologies, abject 
apologies, concessions of justice to Ireland, 
and we are called tyrants and oppressors, 
and assassins of Irish liberty. 

But I am speaking here of the relations 
of the two parties in Ireland and America ; 
and by the side of this address of the 
Catholics I will lay a letter of the viceroy 
to Lord North, written at precisely the 
same time. The Irish House of Commons 



122 Fronde s Lectures. 

was composed almost entirely of the landed 
gentry, the members of the Established 
Church, and of all classes of Irish Pro- 
testants, those less likely to sympathize 
with America. Through a house so com- 
posed the viceroy had succeeded in car- 
rying with very great difficulty, as he 
confessed, and with the help of a purchased 
majority, a bare vote condemning the 
revolt of the Colonies. 

The letter alluded to the gaining strength 
of the Presbyterians in the North, who in 
their hearts, it says, are Americans, and 
who are seeking to induce Ireland to take 
an adverse part in this contest. 

You will see from these papers, resumed 
the lecturer, that I have not misstated the 
part taken by the two sections of Ireland 
at the opening of the war. Well, gentle- 
men, the Revolution broke the chains of 
Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant. The 
same questions were at stake on both sides 



Fronde s Lectures, 123 

of the Atlantic — the right of the mother 
country to utilize her so-called dependen- 
cies for her own interest ; and the struggle 
decided in one country was decided in the 
other. I will not weary you with details 
of the familiar story. As the wrestle with 
America grew more intense, England's 
other enemies took advantage of her diffi- 
culties. France, Spain, and Holland suc- 
cessively declared war against her. She 
stood, a little country with her 8,000,000 
souls, assailed at home with the strongest 
powers in Europe, and fighting desperately 
to retain her hold on this enormous conti- 
nent. Unjust and arrogant as was the pol- 
icy that led her into her difficulties, I am 
most proud as an Englishman, from the 
very bottom of my heart, of the courage 
with which she bore herself in that tremen- 
dous conflict. She could not conquer 
America, but she could still give account 
of those neighbors of hers who thought to 



124 Fronde's Lectures. 

quit reckoning with her when her hands 
were tied. Her Rodneys could still shat- 
ter the armies of France, her Elliotts could 
still make bonfires of the floating batteries 
that thought to drive her out of Gibraltar. 
She was never more fierce and dangerous 
than when it was seen she was beaten upon 
her knees. 

But her experience here had not been 
thrown away. She understood that if she 
was to keep her remaining colonies she 
must listen to their just complaints, and she 
did not care to provoke another domestic 
war. A beginning was made in Ireland, 
with the repeal of some Roman Catholic 
disability. So fast as any law was seen to 
be clearly wrong and impolitic, England 
now made haste to repeal it, and, having 
once launched upon a career of reform, in 
a very few years she would not have left 
the Irish one civil or social grievance to 
complain of, had it not been for one cause. 



Fronde s Lectures. 125 

I say there was no practical wrong at 
that time of which Ireland had to complain 
that would not have been removed com- 
pletely, and in a very few years, under the 
Constitution as it stood at the time of Lord 
Cornwallis's surrender. But Ireland de- 
manded the concession of her own Parlia- 
ment and freedom from English legislation. 
You say Ireland was the best judge of her 
own disorders, and the best judge of the 
remedies that would cure them. I reply 
that self-government is the best of all forms 
of government, and for that reason it re- 
quires the best kind of men to administer 
it. It requires experience, wisdom, self-re- 
straint, union, patriotism. England had 
governed Ire.land ill, most ill. Granted; 
but, looking to Ireland's actual state and 
the condition of the Irish people, was there 
better hope for Ireland if the authority of 
England was altogether removed ? 

I wish to speak with all honor, admira- 



126 Fronde s Lectures. 

tion, even enthusiastic admiration, of Mr. 
Grattan. Not only was Mr. Grattan one of 
the most brilliant orators of his own and of 
any age, but, what is more to the purpose, 
one of the most honest of men. In the 
secret state correspondence of those years, 
I have looked into mysteries which the 
right hand that wrote them would gladly 
have concealed from the left. In these sin- 
gular labyrinths of intrigue and treachery, 
I found Irishmen, whose names stand fair 
enough, concerned in transactions which 
show them to have been knaves and scoun- 
drels, but I never found a shadow of stain 
on the reputation of Mr. Grattan. I say 
nothing of the temptations to which he 
was exposed. There were no honors with 
which England would not have decorated 
him. There was no price so high which 
England would not have paid to silence 
him. He was one of those perfectly disin- 
terested men who do not feel temptations 



Fronde s Lectures. 127 

of this kind. They passed by and over 
him without giving him even the pain of 
turning his back upon them. At every 
step of his life, Grattan was governed en- 
tirely by what he conceived to be the 
interest of his country. Whether he was 
as wise as he was upright is another ques- 
tion altogether. 

As the American war approached its last 
year, every available soldier was with- 
drawn from Ireland. The people demand- 
ed arms for their own protection, and the 
request was one which could not be re- 
fused. Corps of volunteers were formed 
all over the country. In a few months, 
forty to fifty thousand of them enrolled, 
and there was no other military force in 
Ireland. Mr. Grattan took the opportun- 
ity of demanding a free constitution for his 
country. The volunteers turned politi- 
cians, and rapped their hands on the butts 
of their muskets. Ireland had been a 



128 Fronde s Lectures. 

province too long. She should now be 
free. 

America was winning absolute independ- 
ence. Mr. Grattan didn't go so far as 
America. She was willing Ireland should 
remain united by the tie of a common 
sovereign, but she wanted to be inde- 
pendent of the English Parliament, the 
English Minister, and the English law 
courts. She should have her own Legis- 
lature and her own Cabinet, and she 
should be governed henceforward by such 
laws, and no other, as the representatives 
of her own people had made for her. 
England had had enough just then of at- 
tempting to coerce unwilling representa- 
tives. English statesmen did not conceal 
from themselves the danger of the experi- 
ment to be tried. 

It was not without having considered 
that question from a point of view little 
dreamed of by the Irish patriots that they 



Fronde s Lectures. 129 

were willing- at last that the experiment 
should receive a trial. They gave way. 
The Constitution of 1782 was established, 
and, amid cannon salvo, patriotic elo- 
quence flowing like water-spouts, and a 
volley of 50,000 muskets, Ireland was de- 
clared a nation. Esto perpetua ! exclaimed 
Grattan, winding up the magnificent pero- 
ration of the finest speech ever heard in 
the House, on College Green. If the cur- 
tain could then have fallen on Ireland, 
could she then have withdrawn among her 
own mists, we should have taken leave of 
her at that moment with the belief that she 
had shaken off her mourning weeds, and 
that her regeneration was at last complete. 
History dispels the illusion. How could 
it be otherwise? So little hope had Eng- 
land that good would come of the rash 
adventure that at one time in the English 
Cabinet thoughts were entertained of tak- 
ing Ireland at her word. The volunteers 



130 Fronde s Lectures. 

threatened that if the Constitution was re- 
fused they would break from England alto- 
gether. What if England had told them 
they were free to go? If she was to retain 
no control over the Legislature of Ireland, 
and no control over the military force, 
then was it worth while to retain a mere 
titular sovereignty ? 

What had she before done to the million 
Protestants and the two million Roman 
Catholics, since they were so anxious to be 
independent, and to take their independ- 
ence, and then settle their own differences ? 
Was it likely that this revolution was seri- 
ously contemplated ? Lord Rodney had 
destroyed the French fleet in the West 
Indies, and America was strong enough to 
strangle a serpent that came seeking her, 
but too young yet to search adventures in 
the other hemisphere. No other power 
would have been able to interfere, and a 
few years' experience under such condi- 



Fronde s Lectures. 131 

tions might have done more than other con- 
ditions of affairs to make Ireland sick of it. 
The Duke of Portland, however, after spe- 
cifying certain conditions which he intended 
to exact from the Irish Parliament in his 
new position, went on thus in a most pri- 
vate and secret dispatch : 

" The refusal of the Irish Parliament to 
consent to the subject is such an indication 
of sinister designs as would warrant Eng- 
land in throwing up the government, and 
leaving it to that fate which their folly and 
treachery should deserve. If such should 
be their sentiments after our effort to en- 
deavor to bring them to a sense of their 
condition and of the responsibility of such 
refusal, I should hesitate but little to order 
the first, and leave them to be the victims 
of their own insanity, as the country, on 
such terms, would not be worth pasturing." 

If the English Cabinet had been troubled 
with moral scruples, I do not doubt that to 



132 Fronde s Lectures. 

have left Ireland awhile in this way to her- 
self would have simplified the Irish prob- 
lem for all time. No friend to either party 
would have entered the island, and Protes- 
tant and Catholic would have been left to 
fight out their battles in their own way. 
The Protestants were inferior in numbers, 
but they had the wealth, the education, and 
the arms. They had the energy and the 
industry, but they had split into Conform- 
formists and Noncomformists. I, for my 
part, looking at the relative condition of 
the two parties at that time, think that the 
numerical strength of the Celtic Catholics 
would have availed them little, and they 
would have been, in all probabilty, either 
exterminated or completely subjugated. 

The answer to the papers was not satis- 
factory, but in justice to the Catholics the 
Duke of Portland was not allowed to fulfil 
his threat. England determined to make 
the best of the opposition. 



Fronde s Lectures. 133 

You will now have to observe the value 
of self-government to a country conditioned 
as Ireland was. England had a pretty clear 
and direct authority to hold the Empire 
together. It was necessary for her to have 
some authority, still more if she intended 
to follow out the cause of beneficent legisla- 
tion which she had commenced for the 
regeneration of the country. Ireland had 
obtained liberty ; Ireland had obtained ju- 
dicial independence. If liberty and inde- 
pendence were to realize anything, now at 
last the field would be clear, and the land- 
lords who had clamored for political reform 
were in alliance with the genius of the 
peasant. Dean Swift somewhere says the 
greatest blessing to a country is the man 
who can make land grow two years of corn 
where only one grew before. Grattan's 
Reform Law for Ireland was as barren as 
they found it. The Constitution of 1782 
might hold out against the encroachment 



134 Fronde s Lectures. 

of England, but there were no guarantees 
against famine, anarchy, and social tyranny. 
Here is Ireland — here is Dublin described 
by an eye-witness in 1783, within a year of 
that ever-memorable event : 

" The Defenders," so this writer says, 
" lived on the spoils like wasps sucking a 
people's blood. Farmers are ruined; the 
avenues to the Parliament House are be- 
set by strife ; manufacturers are praying 
for relief against approaching famine ; the 
guards of the city are doubled, and ordered 
to hold themselves ready to massacre the 
people." 

In the midst of this scene occurs a singu- 
lar illustration of the new judicial system. 
There was nothing for which Grattan had 
fought harder. Irish causes were to be 
decided in Irish courts, and appeals were 
to be heard in the Irish House of Lords. 
The very first case which came on for hear- 
ing was an exceedingly difficult one. It 



Fronde s Lectures. 135 

involved a large property which was to be 
divided, and debts were of the greatest 
consequence. A decree had been given by 
the judges, but such was the plan that the 
decision had been rendered by the casting 
vote of the Lord Chancellor. The case 
was carried up before the House of Lords, 
and an Irish nobleman, who, besides his 
peerage, was clergyman, the Dean of 
Derry, actually wrote to one of the liti- 
gants, and promised him his vote for £200. 
And what was Grattan about, now that 
he had emancipated his country? Was 
Grattan -discovering how the peasants 
should feed their starving children ? The 
members of the House of Commons were 
engaged then in obstructing the ad- 
ministration, and Grattan had no longer 
power to lead them. They had discovered 
that by their new opposition their power 
of imprisoning the Government was in- 
creased, and they were engaged in ad- 



136 Fronde s Lectures. 

justing their demands upon the Irish 
Opposition members, which their peace 
now rendered necessary. Corruption, 
which was before so scandalous, had now 
become infamous. The ordinary business 
of administration could not be carried on 
until the members of Parliament had been 
rewarded according- to their notion of their 
own deserts. The English viceroys could 
not help themselves, for the purse-strings 
were speedily untied by designing men. 
Dublin soon became an open market for 
Government offices ; and sinecures, peer- 
ages, and places of state were openly ex- 
posed at public sale. Irish political 
morality was completely sapped. The 
Houses of the Legislature were filled with 
an army of noblemen greedy to swallow 
the golden bait. The free Ireland, wel- 
comed in with so much enthusiasm, existed 
only to bring liberty into contempt. 

The principal thing for the Irish member 



Fronde s Lectures. 137 

of Parliament to look at was for opportuni- 
ties to destroy the Government, and not for 
any public purpose of good or any useful 
association, but simply to extort further 
benefits of money and promises for its lead- 
ing members. The Government was some- 
times resisted amid mingled indignation 
and distrust, but resistance, if successful, 
was possibly won by further uses of the 
same dishonorable influences. Such was 
Ireland in the times before the Constitu- 
tion of 1782 from a living reality. Such 
was Ireland when she saw in Europe, high 
above the smoke of the burning Bastile, 
arising the terrible portent of the French 
Revolution. 

Already they had demanded parlia- 
mentary reform in Ireland. The House of 
Commons, as it stood, was too evident a 
mockery. It consisted at this time of 300 
members, 64 of them returned for county 
and 236 for borough towns. Of the 300 



138 Fronde s Lectures. 

seats about, sixty were fairly open to bid- 
ders. Protestants could not be voted for, 
and Protestants could only be elected ; and 
at one time a particular nobleman, owning 
from 10 to 12 boroughs, controlled from 10 
to 30 members. The Irish seats were sold, 
^"2,000 being the average price. A noble- 
man could sell a peerage for ;£ 12,000, and 
buy half a dozen seats with the money. 
Mr. Grattan and other prominent Irish 
noblemen, finding that the condition of 
affairs was simply ridiculous, formed them- 
selves into an organization. It was called 
the "Whig Club," and was designed to 
promote parliamentary reform ; but what 
that reform was to be they could not agree 
among themselves, so great was the oppo- 
sition of the Catholics. 

Generally in Europe, when the Catholics 
came in contact with the spirit of reform, 
it was not as friends, but as enemies. 
There were too ugly stories of rampant 



Fronde s Lectures. 139 

spoliation of many kinds in circulation. The 
Protestants held nine-tenths of the land, 
and the Irish masses stood uncertain when 
the French Revolution broke out. After 
the first year or two, the friends of liberty 
were in ecstasy, but as the sky darkened and 
the true meaning of that tremendous trans- 
action became apparent, the Whig spirits 
were dismayed and horror-struck. All hu- 
man society appeared to be threatened, and 
established courts and established institu- 
tions instinctively drew toward each other, 
in defence of religion and good order. 
England declared war against the Jacobins, 
and her attitude toward the Roman Catho- 
lics immediately changed. Hitherto the 
Roman Catholic religion had been treated 
as its dangerous enemy. It was now held 
as conservative law. Hitherto she had not 
been disposed to shield the Catholics from 
the severe execution of the penal law, but 
now the great English statesmen, William 



140 Froude s Lectures. 

Pitt and Burke, took up the cause of Cath- 
olic Emancipation. The Presbyterians of 
the North had been Republican from the 
very first. They retained their approbation 
of the Long Parliament, and the success of 
the Revolution in America had quickened 
the ashes of the old fires. Calvinism was 
dying away. The spirit of the dead passed 
from religion to politics, and their animosity 
for Catholics was but little less than their re- 
sentment against the landlords. Some of 
the more ardent spirits in Dublin and Belfast 
believed that the time was coming when 
Ireland might indeed rise out of the ashes 
of the Catholic and Protestant religions, and 
then make a supreme effort to establish an 
Irish Republic. I need only mention to you 
the names of the two Emmets, of Wolf Tone, 
of Arthur O'Connell, and Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald. They were patriots, true pa- 
triots — generous, brave, enthusiastic, and 
unable to believe that they could fail. 



Froudes Lectures. 141 

They were filled with the passionate con- 
viction that without political independence 
all their blessings would fail. Like Grat- 
tan, they meant separation from England, 
and as a step toward it they demanded par- 
liamentary reform, and so far were unwill- 
ing to act with the Whig Club. They or- 
ganized themselves into the celebrated 
body of United Irishmen, with central 
lodges at Belfast and the capital, with sub- 
ordinate branches scattered through the 
country. Every true Irishman was invited 
to enroll his name. The genius of the Rev- 
olution had touched the Irish harp and 
struck its strings with passionate impulses 
of the Irish people. Between the Govern- 
ment and the United Irishmen lay the Cath- 
olic gentry, bishops, and clergy. They 
saw there how they were agreed to have 
done forever with thraldom, in order to 
recover their valued privileges as citizens ; 
but whether to receive their emancipation 



142 Fronde s Lectures. 

from Pitt and England, or from Wolf Tone 
and the Revolution, was not easy for them 
to decide. They, too, were organizing 
themselves. They had their Catholic Com- 
mittee, which sat in Dublin as a Second 
Parliament, and Mr. Pitt had not only mis- 
conceived their probable sentiments, but 
some of them, the bishops especially, were 
deeply shocked, and had a fresh cause to 
shudder at the thought of an alliance with 
the assassins of Louis XVI. If the Gov- 
ernment would do them justice, they were 
more inclined to stand by the Government, 
Conciliation admitted of progress ; and, 
while the Catholics had already recovered 
the elective franchise in 1793, they had yet 
to recover the right to sit in Parliament. 
But the spirit of 1641 was awake again. 
It was made bountifully clear that half the 
Catholics were in league with the United 
Irishmen. In the presence of such a spir t, 
further concessions were necessarily ex- 



Fronde s Lectures. 143 

tended, and those gradually, as other dis- 
contented parties demanded them under 
the protection of the Republicans. 

Such were the fruits of ten years of lib- 
erty — a liberty which had been held by 
Grattan as the dawn of a new era of peace 
and prosperity. The constitution tied the 
hands of the Government. They saw rebel- 
lion approaching at that time, and knew 
not how to check it. In the provinces, in 
connection with the United Irishmen, there 
was a body of defenders formed — defenders 
of the rights of the peasantry. They were 
combinations against a landlord's tyranny, 
and a reign of terror ensued. Houses 
were burned, villages plundered, and col- 
lisions between the defenders and bodies 
of soldiers were of frequent occurrence. 
The lodges for the United Irishmen spread 
over the whole island, and whole shiploads 
of arms were being shipped from France 
for their revolutionary army. 



144 Fronde s Lectures. 

Now, once more, Ireland had a real 
chance. England had flung- her whole 
strength into the war with France, and the 
success of the revolutionary arms promised 
a long and most desperate struggle. The 
Northern Presbyterians appeared to be at 
last heart and soul with the Catholics. 
One hundred thousand Protestant farmers 
living in the Ulster province had been 
sworn into the association, all armed, all 
reconciled, all determined to have done 
with church, and land, and landlords, and 
English tyranny. Two hundred thousand 
Catholics, at least, had been enrolled in the 
other provinces. The great towns of Dub- 
lin and Belfast especially were enthusiastic 
for the cause. Something ought to have 
come at least of such a mighty preparation. 
Then, if ever, Irish nationality ought to 
have become effected. There was, how- 
ever, from the first, visible in the proceed- 
ings of the United Irishmen a conflict of 



Fronde s Lectures. 145 

creed. Wolf Tone, who appears to have 
been another Franklin, listened to the 
original plan for the formation of his so- 
ciety — a society to be formed in Dublin 
with a secrecy something of the ceremo- 
nial of Freemasonry. " Secrecy," it said, 
" is expedient and necessary. It will make 
the spirit of the nation more ardent, and 
will confound and terrify by its agency." 

This is not the stuff of which successful 
revolutions are made. This is the stuff of 
which most admirable and most excellent 
leading; articles are made. Attached to 
this paper is a private letter of Wolf 
Tone's, containing a further account of his 
views. He mentions the names of a few 
of his friends who had promised to stand 
by him. Where did I find these papers ? 
In the English State Paper Office. Before 
long, before it was printed, almost before 
the ink was dry, it was in the hands of the 
English Government. Among the men 



146 Froudes Lectures. 

taken into their counsel, one must have 
been a traitor. From the first dawn of the 
conspiracy, one of his dearest friends had 
been betraying- him, and the members of 
the Council of the United Irishmen, united 
in what they professed to regard as a most 
holy cause, were from the very beginning 
selling their secrets and lives to the English 
Minister. Of such material have the con- 
spiracies in that unhappy country been 
formed. There is no more spot upon Wolf 
Tone's honor than upon Grattan's. Among 
the Irish there ran many veins of down- 
right treachery. Men to whom to the last 
were entrusted the most dangerous secrets 
got, by treachery, the miserable profits of 
their baseness, only stipulating that they 
should not be brought into the courts of 
justice. I know that one of his best friends 
betrayed Wolf Tone. These damning evi- 
dences of treachery would have convinced 
him of the entire impossibility of a sue- 



Fronde s Lectures. 147 

cessful combination for the severance of 
Ireland from England being formed out of 
Irish material. The Government could not 
meddle with it until it entangled itself in 
some act of treason. Now and then some 
one made a slip, wrote a treasonable letter, 
or something of that kind. Papers were 
seized, and men were tried. No one knew 
where the information came from. 

Hamilton Rowan escaped to America. 
He distrusted the atmosphere. Wolf Tone 
also fled to America with his wife and 
children. Tone escaped, but went back to 
Paris, and worked to bring about an inva- 
sion of Ireland. The Irish only needed 
a spark of encouragement from abroad. 
Lord Edward Fitzgerald went to the Con- 
tinent for the same purpose, and had an 
interview with the French Minister of 
War. Almost before they met, a little 
bird carried the news to Downing Street 
Lady Edward, the celebrated Pamela, hac 



148 Fronde s Lectures. 

a house at Hamburg. There the Irishman 
could meet, and from there communicate 
with their friends in Ireland. But her 
most trusted friend was coiling like a snake 
upon her path. There came one night 
to the minister's house in London a man 
wrapped in a great cloak. He had secrets 
to tell of the greatest importance concern- 
ing a movement against the Government, 
and his conscience would not allow him 
to keep them. His information tallied 
with what the Government had already 
learned, and they saw, therefore, that they 
might trust and use him. He went to 
Hamburg ; he lived in Lady Edward's 
house ; and saw and spoke with, unsuspect- 
ed, every one who came there. He gave 
information which led Mr. Pitt to seize let- 
ters of the utmost importance. When all 
was over, he had a pension from the 
Crown. His name was — I would better 
not mention his name. 



Fronde s Lectures. 149 

Meanwhile, unconscious of the treason 
which Avas undermining- them, the Irish 
leaders worked with unabated eagerness. 
The Government was contented to watch 
their movements, prepared to strike at a 
moment's notice. The Irish showed sin- 
gular skill. An English fleet was being 
equipped. A number of Irishmen enlisted 
among the crew, and soon brought about a 
mutiny among the sailors. At last a fleet 
sailed from France, taking Tone with it. 
It reached Ireland, but a gale of wind pre- 
vented an immediate landing. The Eng- 
lish were enabled to get together a force 
sufficient to keep them in check. There 
was no news of any rising among the peo- 
ple, and the attempt at last proved a failure. 
Tone himself had been against any attempt 
in the South. 

Another expedition was formed. This 
time a Dutch fleet was to pass around Ire- 
land. Admiral Danton, with sailors who 



150 Froudes Lectures. 

were anxious to cover up the disgrace of 
their former mutiny, fell in with the Dutch 
outside of the banks, and destroyed their 
fleet. The English now issued orders for 
a general disarming of the Irish people. 
The rebel leaders felt that they could 
wait no longer. They were, of course, 
betrayed at a meeting. Lord Edward Fitz- 
gerald was away, but his hiding-place was 
revealed, and he died in prison. The peo- 
ple rose under inferior leaders, and acted 
just as their impulses moved them. They 
surprised a few ports, and cut in pieces a 
few English soldiers. In the South, and 
everywhere except in Ulster, the insurrec- 
tion assumed a character that long-sighted 
people had long seen to be certain of com- 
ing. The union of the two creeds, Catho- 
lic and Protestant, became impossible, and 
it turned into a war of religions. Protes- 
tant churches and chapels were burned, 
and the movement became a Catholic cm- 



Fronde s Lectures. 151 

sade. However fair the prospects of the 
United Irishmen in the beginning", it was 
but a struggle of the Celts to recover the 
soil and of the priests to recover Catholic 
supremacy. Horrible things are done 
when mobs of unprincipled men get power 
into their hands. But mobs never succeed 
in doing anything but mischief. 

What had Grattan done? What had 
Grattan's constitution done for his coun- 
try? Ireland, when the American war 
broke out, lay under a code of laws so 
unjust as to drive an unhappy people to a 
revolution for a remedy. The restrictions 
on trade had been taken off, and the restric- 
tions on the Catholics were fast passing 
away. Had this been taken care of, all else 
must have been righted. Grattan was led 
away with what I call a delirium of nation- 
ality. He insisted upon national independ- 
ence, and what was the result ? Did any 
peasant pav lighter rent to his landlord? 



152 Frondes Lectures. 

Was any tenant saved from eviction? 
Grattan said, " Make Ireland a nation, and 
Ireland will redress her own wrongs." 
She became a nation, and actions which 
before were scandalous became infamous. 
The Irish Parliament became a market in 
which peers and commoners sold them- 
selves. Honest Irishmen formed in asso- 
ciations to find deliverance in arms. 
Where one or two were gathered together, 
one was a traitor. The fruit of all this was 
the death or banishment of most of them, 
and a fresh list. of massacres and horrors 
swelled the lines of party hatred. If insur- 
gents are not strong enough to frighten the 
government, government must and will put 
down the insurgents. Do you suppose the 
Irishmen would have governed Ireland 
very beautifully if Ireland had been left to 
them ? Those unions only are fit to be in- 
dependent which have strength and cour- 
age to be their own liberators. The neces- 



Fronde s Lectures. 153 

sary qualities are not yet to be found in 
Ireland. Political agitators have been and 
always will be a curse to Ireland. But all 
people have a right to justice. When the 
light shines in upon a definite injustice, it 
cannot long remain in existence. A good 
government is the light of all. The Irish 
missed the substance in grasping at the 
shadow. 

To leave the Irish Parliament, standing 
as it was after the Rebellion, was to leave 
one of the most corrupt institutions that the 
world has ever seen. To hand over Ire- 
land to such a Parliament was to leave 
Catholics and Protestants smarting under 
the wounds of Derry. There was no 
serious objection to a union with England. 
Cromwell had seen the inevitable necessity. 
She refused then, and at last was obliged 
to sue for what she might have had them 
begging her to take. When the Act of 
Union was first proposed, a shriek of patri- 



154 Frondes LecUires. 

otism ran over the country. Before their 
constituents the members of Parliament 
wept floods of tears. In private, a great 
many of them, like sensible men, gave Eng- 
land to understand that they were more 
reasonable. Corrupt from the hour that 
Grattan left them, having sold their con- 
sciences for eighteen years, they ended in 
selling their consent to the order which 
terminated their existence. It was a 
scandalous end to a scandalous existence. 
It was the end, and, for my own part, I 
hope from my heart, the final end. I, foi 
myself, will say for the Union what Grattan 
said of his constitution, " Esto perpetual 



Froudfs Fifth Lecture. 



DELIVERED OCTOBER 25, 1872. 



Mr. Froude began by alluding- to a slight 
inaccuracy he had made in his last lecture 
in quoting from Mr. Grattan's speech. 
This was, however, simply an error of 
arrangement, not of fact. He went on to 
say that forms of government should not 
be so much kept in view as the spiritual 
and material condition of the people. 
Aristocracies were only bad because they 
were more liable to be distorted by self- 
interest. Just laws were the first requisite 
of a good government, and it was only when 
the government governed badly that the 



156 Fronde s Lect tires. 

constitution should be attacked. But re- 
verse this law, and begin political agitation 
before you had a clear idea of what you 
wished to destroy or to build up, and your 
efforts were worse than useless. The Irish 
had fallen into this mistake almost invaria- 
bly, and scarcely had they ever got fairly 
into the path of practical reform than 
they had been thrown back again by foolish 
political agitation. Just before the insur- 
rection of '98, all of Ireland's grievances 
were in course of redress ; but these 
concessions were simply interpreted by the 
Irish as meaning that England was afraid 
of them. In 1802, the constitution that 
succeeded the Union was fairly at work. 
Three-quarters of a country more fertile 
than Scotland, and as fertile as the best 
parts of England, was almost a desolate 
wilderness. The lands were untilled, and 
the peasantry dwelt in miserable cabins with- 
out windows, which they shared with their 



*t 



Frondes Lectures. 157 

pigs. Their holdings were perhaps only an 
acre or two, cultivated with potatoes, for 
which they gave the old ruinous rack rent. 
And yet the people were not unhappy; 
their only fear was lest some neighbor 
might bid a higher rent, and the landlord 
•should drive them away to starve in the 
nearest ditch. The landlords were of sev- 
eral kinds, the main classes being the great 
magnates who lived in London, and the 
squires and squireens, Avho gambled and 
drank and fought duels and ruined their 
tenants. It was remarkable, however, that 
this last was the most popular, while the 
improving landlord was hated intensely, 
because, finding his land littered with pau- 
pers, he removed them to make way for 
thrifty and industrious Scotchmen or Eng- 
lishmen. After all, these paupers, or ver- 
min, as they were called, were human 
beings. Was it wonderful that they should 
retaliate by the murder of the improving 



158 Frondes Lectures. 

landlord, or of the improving landlord's 
agent or bailiff? Such was Ireland after 
six hundred years of English rule. The 
law had invariably been the enemy of Irish- 
men, and they were therefore lawless. A 
more powerful police was the next thing 
called for. But it was of no good to reor- 
ganize the police unless the iniquitous laws 
that had led to crime were abolished. 
Then, again, the religious question came 
forward. The Established Church had 
been set up to secure the conversion of 
Ireland, yet four- fifths of the people were 
Catholic, and would remain so, while of the 
Protestants less than half acknowledged 
this same state establishment. He (Froude) 
did not think, however, that the religious 
grievance of Ireland had been the greatest 
of England's wrongs. He, for one, recog- 
nized the immense influence for good of 
the Catholic clergy. There was no vulgar 
crime in Ireland, and Irishmen showed a 



Fronde s Lectures. 159 

delicacy and modesty of character which 
was undoubtedly due to the influence of 
their religious teachers. But the Romish 
Church was a very different matter. So 
long- as the popes retained a hope of recov- 
ering their old power, no Catholic was per- 
mitted to be a loyal subject to a Protestant 
prince ; and for two centuries a bitter war 
was waged against the reformed religion. 
Could England, therefore, allow the priests 
to destroy their power in Ireland any more 
than Prince Bismarck could to-day allow 
the Jesuits to undo the German Confeder- 
acy? The Irishman for centuries looked 
upon his allegiance to the pope as superior 
to his English sovereign. Far more blame 
was due to England for her cruelty and 
oppression to the Irish Nonconformists 
than for her treatment of the Irish Catho- 
lics. After the peace of Utrecht, politics 
assumed a different complexion. 

It ceased to be the avowed duty of 



160 Fronde s Lectures. 

the Catholic to never recognize the autho- 
rity of a Protestant prince. But for the 
United Irishmen and the Rebellion of '98 
Catholic emancipation would have been at 
once passed as a just and necessary law, 
whereas it was reserved for O'Connell to 
achieve it by a long and tedious struggle. 
But much remained to be done after eman- 
cipation was granted. The peasant was 
worse off than ever. His landlord was 
generally a Protestant, and said to him, 
" You must vote as I do, or I will turn you 
off my land " ; while the priest said, " You 
must vote as I wish you, or I shall excom- 
municate you." O'Connell, if he had 
wished, instead of clamoring for repeal, 
which he knew he would never get, might 
have secured many years sooner a just land 
law, such as Mr. Gladstone had recently 
passed. The English reformers, such as 
Sir Robert Peel, had, however, succeeded 
in giving the Irish a satisfactory measure 



Froudes Lectures. 161 

of education ; but this had been greatly 
nullified by the influence of the priests, who 
desired that the sheep should be separated 
from the goats on this as well as on the 
other side of the day of judgment. The 
great evil of Ireland after emancipation was 
the land tenure. The landlords for the 
most part were impoverished and out at 
elbows, while the peasantry multiplied ex- 
ceedingly, owing to the encouragement of 
both the priests and the landlords, the 
former in order to avoid immorality, and the 
latter because the more people there were 
the higher rose his rents. In 1846, there 
were 9,000,000 of people, 2,000,000 of whom 
were beggars, and all living on the eternal 
potato. We most of us remembered how 
sadly all this ended. The note of warning 
had long been sounded. Cobbett had 
shown the folly of allowing an immense 
population to spring up, trusting for sup- 
port to one single precarious crop. The 



1 62 Fronde s Lectures. 

potato failed, and there came the famine. 
The Irish bore the calamity with a patience 
and heroism that could not be too highly 
admired. A quarter of a million of them 
perished of sheer hunger. As fast as it 
could be done, supplies were sent by Eng- 
land, and the government voted ten mil- 
lions of money, eight of which he believed 
had been stolen. America also forwarded 
magnificent contributions, and from all 
parts of the world there came help and 
succor. At length the famine was stayed, 
and, as usual, the blame was thrown on the 
wrong shoulders. 

Political economists upbraided the Con- 
nemara peasant because he was not suffi- 
ciently well up in " Matthews on Popula- 
tion." The first result of the famine was 
the revival of political delirium. O'Con- 
nell preached repeal as the spring of Ire- 
land's misery, just as he had previously 
preached the same thing about emaneipa- 



Fronde s Lectures. 163 

tion. Then suddenly came the report that 
400,000 Irishmen were prepared for revolt. 
He (Froude) had himself gone to Ireland, 
believing that the day of judgment had 
indeed come at last. But how miserably it 
all ended ! A scuffle in a cabbage-garden, 
and the appearance of the police — that was 
all. Never before had insurrection met so 
miserable a fate ; for it was now in Ireland 
for the first time ridiculous. The next 
effect of the famine was the passage of an 
act through the Irish Parliament that the 
Irish land should support the Irish poor. 
This completed the ruin of the encumbered 
Irish landed gentry, and they had now 
faded for ever away. The 9,000,000 of the 
Irish people had also, in consequence of .the 
famine, dwindled down to 5,500,000, which, 
allowing for the natural rate of increase, 
showed an emigration of between five and 
six millions. The famine also stimulated 
many of the landlords to raise the condition 



164 Fronde's Lectures. 

of their tenants, and on many Irish estates 
now the farmers and peasantry were much 
better off than his English fellow-subjects. 
But the good landlords were few, and, to 
get rid of the impoverished remainder, 
Parliament passed the Encumbered Estates 
Act, which enabled a creditor to demand the 
sale of his debtor's land. The new purcha- 
sers of the land very generally reduced the 
number of their tenants. They were most- 
ly prosperous business Irishmen, who had 
little pity for their poorer countrymen. 
Some of the purchasers, also, were land 
speculators, who would buy an estate on a 
promissory note, and, having cleared the 
estate of its superfluous tenantry, would 
again throw it into the market, and sell it at 
a highly advanced price. The poor pea- 
santry were told to go — to go to the devil 
if they could find nowhere else to go to ; 
and so they went to America. He (Froude) 
thought that if the English government had 



Fronde s Lectures. 165 

managed properly they might have made 
this necessity of emigration a conciliatory 
measure. They might have said to the 
evicted tenant, " It is true we can't keep 
you here at home, but in our colonies we 
will give you each 200 acres of land, with 
provisions out of the public funds for their 
maintenance during the first year of occu- 
pation." This might have cost about twice 
as much as the Abyssinian war had in- 
involved, or half what had been thrown 
into the mud at Balaklava, but it would 
have been a good money investment. It 
was needless, however, to say that nothing 
of the kind was done. The emigrants left 
for America with bitterness in their hearts, 
while the Irish peasantry at home formed 
themselves into disloyal bands, and re- 
dressed their wrongs by the wild justice of 
murder. 

The landlords would have had their hands 
tied sooner than had been the case but for 



166 Fronde s Lectures. 

the cropping out again of the old folly of 
political agitation. He (Froude) did not 
blame the Irish for their desire for inde- 
pendence. He admitted the'" sacred right 
of revolution," but it was sacred only when 
the insurgents had power to achieve it. It 
was only when justice was denied and the 
last hope of redress had died away that it 
was lawful to call up the spirits of fire and 
blood. Never had there been a more un- 
justifiable revolt, judged from this point of 
view, than the Fenian Rebellion. The Re- 
bellion of 1848 had ended in a comedy, and 
the Fenian Rebellion had ended very little 
better. But, in spite of the Rebellion, Eng- 
land had resolved that if the Irish rebelled 
again they should at least have no valid 
grievances to complain of. Mr. Gladstone 
took the matter in hand, and began by de- 
nouncing the " upas-tree of Protestant as- 
cendency." This was a taunt altogether 
unprovoked and unnecessary ; but Mr. 



Froude s Lectures. 167 

Gladstone disestablished the Irish Church, 
which would have been well enough had it 
been abolished as a state establishment and 
not as a religion. The priests then clam- 
ored about the universal education that 
prevailed in Ireland ; but Ireland's great 
evil remained the same as ever — the land 
tenure — and this had been redressed by Mr. 
Gladstone's healing Land Act of three years 
ago. The landlord could no longer evict 
the humblest peasant without having to 
pay for his cruelty. He now had to pay 
his tenant for every stroke of work he had 
put into it, and something besides. The 
Irish now demanded home rule, and, it 
might be asked, why not grant this as well? 
He answered, because no home-rule gov- 
ernment would have ever passed the Land 
Act. Ah Irish Parliament would necessarily 
be composed chiefly of landed gentlemen, 
who in Ireland would of their own free 
will never do justice to the Irish peasantry 



1 68 Frondes Lectures. 

until afternoon on doomsday. Another ob- 
jection to home rule was that Ireland was 
not one nation, but two. Protestant ascen- 
dency had been abolished, but he did not 
wish now to see Catholic ascendency estab- 
lished. He (Mr. Froude) believed that the 
proud, high-spirited Protestants of the 
North would never consent to be governed 
by the mere numbers of the Catholic Irish 
majority. Within a year England would 
be compelled to interfere to prevent civil 
war. He hoped, therefore, that no such 
rash and dangerous measure would be 
attempted. Something, however, remained 
to be done. The landlords had changed 
their ideas, and now knew that they must 
make their choice between power and self- 
indulgence. If they wished political influ- 
ence, they must do something else than 
merely spend their money. Eviction, too, 
was still possible, and in these days of enor- 
mous millonaires it might sometimes pay 



Fronde s Lectures. 169 

to sweep a barony clear of its people, and 
turn it into a deer forest. This should be 
remedied, and the English Parliament was 
now no longer the representative of a mere 
class, and English landed gentlemen would 
soon have to live for nobler objects than 
self-indulgence, or they would be swept 
away. In the good work of reform, the 
Irish people might help their English neigh- 
bors if, listening only, to nobler instincts 
than nationality, they joined hands with 
them in the cause of progress. He (Mr. 
Froude) concluded by hoping that the sym- 
pathy of the American Republic would be 
given to the right side. 



Froudfs Reply to Father 
Burke- 



NOVEMBER, 30, 1872. 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

If my object in coming to this country 
was to draw attention to the Irish subject, 
I may so far be said to have succeeded. 
I have succeeded also, beyond my expec- 
tation, in eliciting a counter-statement 
containing the opinions of the Irish people 
themselves on their past history, the most 
complete, the most symmetrical, the most 
thoroughgoing which has yet been given 
to the world. 

The successive positions taken by Father 
Burke have been long familiar to me, some 



Froudes Lectures. 171 

in one book and some in another. But no- 
where have so many of them been com- 
bined so artistically, and not till now have 
the}^ been presented in what may be called 
an authoritative form. Father Burke re- 
grets that I should have obliged him to 
reopen wounds which he would have pre- 
ferred to have left closed. I conceive, on 
the other hand, that a wound is never 
healed so long as there is misunderstanding. 
England and Ireland can approach each 
other only on the basis of truth, and so 
long as Irish children are fed with the 
story which Father Burke has so eloquent- 
ly told, so long they must regard England 
with eyes of utter detestation until full 
atonement be made for past wrongs. If 
Father Burke's account is true, let England 
know it, look it in the face, and acknow- 
ledge it. If it be an illusion or tissue of 
illusions, then it is equally desirable that 
the Irish should know it, and a bridge of 



172 Fronde s Lectures. 

solid fact be laid across the gulf that 
divides us. A subject of this kind can only 
usefully be treated from the platform, if the 
audience will bear «their share of the 
burden, if they will test by reference what 
they hear, compare evidence, and analyze 
it. You will learn more from the books 
to which I shall refer you than you can 
learn from me in the time for which I will 
address you. I shall myself venture to 
indicate the particulars where Father 
Burke's narration specially needs examina- 
tion, and refer you to authorities. That an 
Irishman's view should be different from 
an Englishman's view is natural and 
inevitable; but the difference must be 
limited by facts, which are easily ascertain- 
able. When they are not ascertainable 
elsewhere, as, for instance, when Father 
Burke attributes words to me which I 
never uttered, I shall venture to speak 
with authority. 



Fronde s Lectures. 173 



I must throw off with a point of this kind. 
The Father says I have come to America 
to ask for the extraordinary verdict that 
England has been right in the manner in 
which she has treated Ireland for seven hun- 
dred years. Considering that I have drawn 
a heavier indictment against England in the 
course of my lectures than she will prob- 
ably thank me for ; considering that I have 
described the history of her connection 
with Ireland from the beginning as a scan- 
dal and reproach to her, I must meet this 
assertion with a simple denial. Father 
Burke goes on to suggest that England is a 
decaying empire, that her power is broken, 
her arm grown feeble, the days of Macau- 
lay's "New Zealander" not far off, that 
England is afraid of the growing strength 
of the Irish in the United States, the 
8,000,000 of them who have come from the 
Old Country, and the 14,000,000 of Irish 
descent. It is scarcely becoming for two 



174 Fronde's lectures. 

British subjects to be discussing in this 
country whether Great Britain is in a state 
of decadence. England is afraid, however, 
and deeply afraid. She is afraid of being 
even driven to use again those measures of 
coercion against Ireland which have been 
the shame of her history. 

But Father Burke's figures, I confess, 
startled me. Of the 42,000,000 of American 
citizens, 22,000,000 were either Irish born 
or sprung from Irish parents. Was this 
possible? I referred to the census of 1870, 
and I was still more confounded. The entire 
number of immigrant foreigners who were 
then in the United States amounted to 
5,556,566. Of these, under two millions 
were Irish. The entire number of children 
born of Irish parents was under two mil- 
lions also. From these figures, it follows, if 
Father Burke is correct, that in these two 
last years there must have come from Ire- 
land no less than 6,000,000 persons, or more 



Fronde s Lectures. 175 

than the entire population of the island, and 
that in the same two years the Irish mothers 
mothers must have produced not fewer 
than 12,000,000 infants. I knew that their 
fertility was remarkable, but I was not pre- 
pared for such an astounding illustration 
of it. 

But Father Burke considers me unfit to 
speak upon this subject, and for three rea- 
sons : First. Because I despise the Irish 
people. I despise them, do I ? Then why 
have I made Ireland my second home? 
Why am I here now? Am I finding my 
undertaking such a pleasant one? I say 
that for various reasons I have a peculiar 
and exceptional respect and esteem for the 
Irish people — I mean for the worthy part of 
them, the peasantry — and I am endeavoring 
to serve them. I say the peasantry. For 
Irish demagogues and political agitators — 
well, for them, yes, I confess I do feel con- 
tempt from the bottom of my soul. I re- 



176 Frondes Lectures. 

joice that Father Burke has disclaimed all 
connection with them. Of all the curses 
which have afflicted Ireland the dema- 
gogues have been the greatest. 

Once more: Father Burke says I am 
unfit to speak of Ireland because I hate the 
Catholic Church. I show my hatred, it 
appears, by holding the church answera- 
ble for the cruelties of the Duke of Alva 
in the Netherlands, and for the massacres 
of St. Bartholomew's Day in France. 
Here is what the Father says on the first 
of these matters : " Alva fought in the 
Netherlands against an uprising against 
the authority of the state. If the rebels 
happened to be Protestants, there is no 
reason to father their blood upon the 
Catholics." I beg you to attend to this 
passage. This is the way in which modern 
Catholic history is composed, and you may 
see from it what kind of lessons children 
will be taught in the national schools ii 



Frondes Lectures. 177 

Catholics have the control of the text-books. 
Father Burke himself, perhaps, only repeats 
what he himself learned. I suppose he 
never heard of the edicts of Charles V. 
By those edicts, which were issued at the 
opening of the Reformation, every man 
convicted of holding- heretical opinions was 
to lose his head. If he was obstinate, and 
refused to recant, he was to be burned. 
Women were to be buried alive. Those 
who concealed heretics were liable to the 
same penalties as the heretics themselves. 
The execution of the edicts was committed 
to the Episcopal Inquisition, and under 
them, in that one reign, the Prince of 
Orange, who was alive at the time, and the 
great Grotius, whose name alone is a guar- 
antee against a suspicion of exaggeration, 
declare that not less than fifty thousand 
persons were put to death in cold blood. 
I have myself expressed a doubt whether 
these numbers could have been really so 



173 Fronde s Lectures. 

large ; but a better judge than I am, a 
man totally untroubled with theological 
prepossessions, the historian Gibbon, con- 
siders the largest estimate to be nearest to 
the truth. I don't ask you to believe me, 
ladies and gentlemen — read Grotius; read 
the Prince of Orange's apology ; read the 
pages of your own Mr. Motley. And then, 
because the Netherlands, unable to endure 
those atrocities, rose in arms to drive the 
Spaniards out of the country, the Duke of 
Alva may massacre 20,000 more of them ; 
they are only rebels. The church is inno- 
cent of their blood. 

Father Burke, in like manner, declares 
the church to be blameless for the de- 
struction of the French Protestants. The 
Te Dennis that were sung at Rome when 
the news came, he says, were for the safety 
of the king, and not for the massacre of 
the Huguenots. Indeed ! Then why did 
the infallible pope issue a medal on which 



Frondes Lectures. 179 



A 



was stamped Hngonotorum j/r^r^— Slaugh- 
ter of the Huguenots? Why was the de- 
sign on the reverse of the medal an angel 
with a sword smiting the Hydra of heresy ? 
Does Father Burke know? I suppose not. 
That the murders in Paris were but the 
beginning of a scene of havoc, which over- 
spread France and lasted for nearly two 
months. Eighteen or nineteen thousand £j, >* 
persons were killed in Paris on the 24th of ^ a*. 
August. By the end of September, the 
list was swollen to 70,000. Strangely in- 
cautious, infallible pope, if he was only^ 



grateful for the safety of Charles IX. ; for ^ ^ 
what must have been the effect of the news 
of the pope's approval on the zeal of the 
orthodox executioners? 

Ladies and gentlemen, I do not hate the 
Catholic religion; some of the best and 
holiest men I have ever heard of have 
lived and died in the Catholic faith. But 
I do hate the spirit which the church dis- 



180 Fronde s Lectures. 

played in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, and I hate the spirit which would 
throw a veil of sophistry over those atroci- 
ties in the nineteenth. The history of the 
illustrious men who fought and bled in that 
long, desperate battle for liberty of con- 
science, that very liberty to which Catho- 
lics now appeal, is a sacred treasure left 
in charge to all succeeding generations. 
If we allow a legend like this of Father 
Burke's to overspread and cloud that 
glorious record, we shall be false to our 
trust, and through our imbecility and cow- 
ardice we may bequeath to future ages the 
legac}' of another struggle. Father Burke 
himself is for toleration — the freest and the 
widest. I am heartily glad of it. I wish 
I could feel that he was speaking for his 
church as well as himself. But my mind 
misgives me when I read the Syllabus. In 
the same number of the New York Tablet 
from which I take his speech, I find an 



Fronde s Lectures. 181 

article Condemning the admission of the 
Jews to the rights of citizens. When I 
was last in Spain, there was no Protestant 
church allowed in the Peninsula. I used 
to feel that, if I had the fortune to die 
there, I should be buried in a field like a 
dog. If all that is now ended, it was not 
ended by the pope and the bishops. It 
was ended by the Revolution. Nor is it 
very hard to be tolerant on Father Burke's 
terms. In his reading of history, the Pro- 
testants were the chief criminals. 

If on those terms he is willing to forgive 
and forget, I, for one, am not. Father 
Burke knows the connection between con- 
fession and absolution. The first is the con- 
dition of the second. When the Catholic 
Church admits frankly her past faults, the 
world will as frankly forgive them. If she 
takes refuge in evasion, if she persists in 
throwing the blame on others who were 
guilty of nothing except resistance to her 



1 82 Fronde s Lectures. 

tyranny, the innocent blood that sue shed 
remains upon her hands, and all the per- 
fumes of Arabia will not sweeten them. I 
will assume, then, that I am fit to speak on 
this Irish subject, and I will at once pass to 
it. I must be brief. I shall pass from 
point to point, and leave irrelevant matter 
on one side. 

I go to the Norman Conquest itself, and 
Pope Adrian's Bull, which Father Burke 
still declares to be a forgery. I need 
hardly say that I attach no consequence to 
the Bull itself. I suppose the Popes of 
Rome have no more right over Ireland 
than I have over Cuba. The popes, how- 
ever, did at that time represent the general 
conscience. What a pope sanctioned was 
usually what the intelligent part of man- 
kind held to be right. If the Normans 
forged such a sanction to color their 
Conquest, they committed a crime which 
ought to be exposed. The naked facts are 



Fronde s Lectures. 183 

these : King Henry, when he conquered 
Ireland, produced as his authority a Bull 
said to have been granted twenty years 
before by Pope Adrian. It is a matter of 
history that from the date of the Conquest 
Peter's pence was paid regularly to Rome 
by Ireland. Ecclesiastical suits were 
referred to Rome. Continual application 
was made to Rome for dispensations to 
marry within the forbidden degrees. 
There was close and constant communica- 
tion from that time forward between the 
Irish people and clergy and the Roman 
court. Is it conceivable that, in the course 
of all this communication, the Irish should 
never have mentioned this forged Bull at 
Rome, or that, if they did mention it, there 
should have been no enquiry and exposure ? 
To me such a supposition is utterly incon- 
ceivable. 

But the Bull, says Father Burke, is a 
forgery on the face of it. The date upon it 



1 84 Fronde s Lectures. 

is 1 1 54. Adrian was elected Pope on the 
3d of December, 11 54. John of Salisbury, 
by whom the Bull was procured, did not 
arrive in Rome to ask for it till 1 155. 
What clearer proof could there be ? Very 
plausible. But forgers would scarcely 
have committed a blunder so simple. 
Father Burke's criticism comes from hand- 
ling tools he is imperfectly acquainted 
with. He is evidently ignorant that the 
English official year began on the 25th of 
March. A paper dated February, 11 54, 
was in reality written in February, 1 1 55. 
The popes did not- use this style, but Eng- 
lishmen did, and a confusion of this kind is 
the most natural thing in the world in the 
publication of a document by which Eng- 
land was specially affected. 

The lecturer here read extracts from Dr. 
Theiner's book, in which a letter from a 
subsequent pope to King Henry III. 
is extracted from the Vatican archives, also 



Froude s Lectures. 185 

a letter from [Donald O'Neill, calling him- 
self King of Ulster, to the pope, speaking of 
the Normans much as Father Burke speaks 
of the English now ; complaining specially 
of Pope Adrian for having, as an English- 
man, sacrificed Ireland to his countrymen. 
Mr. Froude also spoke at length of the 
bishops and the oath of supremacy to King 
Henry, various points in the history of 
James II., Elizabeth's conduct in Ireland, 
of the Rebellion, which he said was by far 
the gravest matter he had to deal with, the 
administration of the Earl of Strafford, of 
the cowardice of the Irish, Mr. Froude 
sa id : — Lastly, he accuses me of hav- 
ing called the Irish cowards, and he 
desires me to take the word back. I 
cannot take back what I never gave. 
Father Burke says that such words cause 
bad blood, and that I may one day have 
cause to remember them. That they cause 
bad blood I have reason to know already, but 



1 86 Fronde s Lectures. 

the words are not mine but his, and he and 
not I must recall them. Not once, but 
again and again, with the loudest emphasis, I 
have spoken of the notorious and splendid 
courage of Irishmen. What 1 said was this — 
and I will say it over again. I was asking 
how it was that a race whose courage was 
above suspicion made so poor a hand of 
rebellion, and I answered my question thus : 
that the Irish would fight only for a cause in 
which they really believed, and that they 
were too shrewd to be duped by illusions 
with which they allowed themselves to 
play. I will add that if 500 of the present 
Irish police, Celts and Catholics, all or 
most of them, enlisted in the cause of order 
and good government, would walk up to 
and walk through the large mob which the 
so-called patriots could collect from the 
four provinces of Ireland ; if it be to call 
men cowards when I say that under the 
severest trials the Irish display the noblest 



Frondes Lectures. 187 

qualities which do honor to humanity when 
they are on the right side, then, and only 
then, have I questioned the courage of 
Irishmen. 

Mr. Froude then referred somewhat in 
detail to the facts of the Rebellion, and 
closed his lecture as follows : Father 
Burke's own knowledge of his subject is 
wide and varied, but I can compare his 
workmanship to nothing so well as to one 
of the lives of his own Irish saints, in which 
legend and reality are so strangely blended 
that the true aspect of things and character 
can no longer be discerned. I believe that 
I have shown that this is the true state of 
the case, though from the state of Father 
Burke's mind upon the subject he may be 
unaware precisely of what has happened to 
hirn. Anyway, I hope that we may now 
part in good-humor ; we may differ about 
the past ; about the present, and for practi- 
cal objects, I believe we are agreed. He 



1 88 Fronde's Lectures. 

loves the Irish peasant, and so do I ; I have 
been accused of having nothing practical to 
propose for Ireland. I have something ex- 
tremely practical ; I want to see the pea- 
sants taken from under the power of their 
landlords, and made answerable to no 
authority but the law. It would not be 
difficult to define for what offence a tenant 
might legally be deprived of his holding. 
He ought not to be dependent on the 
caprice of any individual man. If Father 
Burke and his friends will help in that way, 
instead of agitating for a separation from 
England, I would sooner find myself work- 
ing with him than against him. If he will 
forget my supposed hatred to his religion, 
and will accept the hand which I hold out 
to him, now that our fight is over, it is a 
hatred, I can assure him, which, like some 
other things, has no existence except in his 
own imagination. 



NOTES. 



Giraldus Cambrensis, so often referred to as an 
authority on the invasion of Ireland by the Anglo- 
Normans, was no other than a certain adventurer, 
of which the period was so fruitful, whose real 
name was Gerald de Barry. He was a Welshman 
by birth, a sycophant by nature, full of vanity and 
mendacity, as his own writings show, and totally 
ignorant of the matters treated in his books. He 
visited Ireland but twice, and then for short times ; 
once with his brother Philip and his uncle Stephen, 
and again in 1185, sixteen years after the landing 
of the Normans, as tutor to Prince John, the weak 
and ungrateful son of Henry II. Totally ignorant 
of the language of the country, its laws, customs, 
and traditions, he had the hardihood, to please his 
royal patron, to write a book about it, entitled, 
" The Conquest," etc. Like a true follower of the 
hordes of William the Bastard, he was sanguinary. 



1 90 Notes. 

at least in theory, for he advised the utter exter- 
mination of the natives. His apologist and trans- 
lator, Hooker, however, says that he did not re- 
commend the extirpation of all the Irish, but only 
such as refused to submit to the royal authority 
(book ii. c. 40). How far he carried his servility 
may be seen in his book on his native country, 
where in chapter viii., de Illaudabilus, he suggests 
t'his method of subjugation of the Welsh, the true 
Britons: "The seas were to be guarded, war 
should be carried on during the winter, divisions 
were to be fomented among the Welsh patriots." 
Could baseness go much further than this ? A 
complete refutation of Barry's work on Ireland 
was published two hundred years ago, under the 
title of " Cambrensis Eversus," of which Ware 
says: "This work was written by John Lynch, a 
secular priest and titular archdeacon of Tuam, 
was a native of Galway. He published his Cam- 
brensis Eversus An. 1662, under the feigned 
name of Gratianus Lucius. It was written in 
Defence of his country against the fabulous and 
malicious Reports made of it by Gerald Barry, 
commonly called Cambrensis, wherein with a 
judicious and sharp Pen he exposeth the number- 



Notes. 191 

less Mistakes, Falshoods, and Calumnies of that 
Writer; shewing, in confuting him, that he was 
well qualified to undertake the subject by a great 
compass of knowledge in the history of his coun- 
try, and in other polite learning." 



" The Norman Conquest of Ireland." — The 
use of this phrase, though at one time in v*ogue, 
shows the utter ignorance of Irish history in him 
who uses it. There was neither conquest nor, in 
the proper sense of the term, invasion by the 
Anglo-Normans of Ireland in the time of Dermid 
McMurrough. The only contemporary, authentic, 
and true account, allowing for the natural bias of 
the writer, we have of the defection of the King 
of Leinsteris from the pen of his trusty emissary 
and interpreter, Maurice Regan. This fragment 
of history, composed in 1177, was first translated 
into French, and from thence into English, by no 
less a personage than Sir George Carew, Lord 
President of Munster under Elizabeth, whose 
MSS. are still preserved in the library of Trinity 
College, Dublin. Regan's version of the affair is 
thus told : 



192 Notes, 

" Dermond, Kyng of Leinster, was a powerful 
prince ; he invaded O'Neal and the Kyng of 
Meath, compelled them to gyve hostages, and 
constrained O'Kerrall to send hym his son for a 
pledge into Leinster. At that tyme O'Rory, Kyng 
of Lethcoin, whose country was woody and full of 
boggs, had to wyfe the daughter of Melaghlin Mac- 
Colman, Kyng of Meath, a fair and lovely lady, 
entirely beloved of Dermond, Kyng of Leinster, 
who also hated O'Rory for an affront which his 
men had received at Lethnuth in his country. 

" Dermond, by leters and messingers, pursued 
her love with such fervency, as, in the end, she 
sent him word that shee was ready to obey, and 
yeld to his will, appointed him a tyme and place 
where he should find her, and prayeing him to 
come soe strongly, as that he might by force take 
her away with him. Dermond presently assem- 
bled his forces, and marched into the county of 
Lethcoin ; at Trimbruin he found this lady, tooke 
her awaye with him, spoiled the county, and re- 
turned with victory and content into Femes. 

" O'Rory, full of grief and rage, addressed hym- 
self unto the Kyng of Connaght, complaining of 
the wrong and scorne done unto hym by the Kyng 



Notes. 



m 



of Leinster, and intreating his aid in the revenge 
of so grete an outrage. 

" O'Conner, Kyng of Connaght, moved with 
honour and compassion, promised him succour, 
and presently he dispatched messingers to the 
King of Ossory unto Melaghlin, King of Meath, to 
Hesculph, Mac Turkell Lord of Dublin, and 
Morrough O'Birne, wyth whome he so muche pre- 
vailed, as they turned heads upon their Lord King 
Dermond. 

" The King of Leinster seeing hymself forsaken 
of his kinsmen, friends, servants, and principal 
followers, having sume more confidence in Mur- 
rough O'Birne than in the rest, took horse, and 
rode to speak with hym. 

" King Dermond being returned to Femes, and 
lodged in the Abbey at Femes, dedicated to the 
Blessed Virgin Mary, commanded the abbot to 
write a letre, which he subscribed, and to deliver 
it to one of his monks to carry it to the Morrough 
O'Birne, hoping thereby to perswade him to a 
meeting. The monke being dispatched, dis- 
charged the trust imposed upon him soe well as 
that he delivered the letre to O'Birne. The King 
followed the monke, and at a woodside saw Mor- 



194 Notes. 

rough O'Birne, who, beholdinge the King, men* 
anced him presently to depart, or else he would 
repent it. 

"The distressed King, almost destracted with 
griefe and anger, returned to Femes, and fearing 
to be betrayed there, and delivered by his people 
unto the King of Connaught, resolved to abandon 
his country, and instantly without delay he went 
to the Horkeran, where he imbarqued hymself for 
England, having in his company no other man of 
marke then Awliffe O'Kinade, and about sixty 
persons. 

"With a prosperous gale he arrived at Bristoll, 
and was lodged with all his companie in the house 
of Robert Hardinge, at St. Augustins, where, 
aftir some staie, he addressed his journey towards 
France, to speak with King Henry, who then had 
wars in that kingdom with the French King. 

" When he came to the presence of King Henry, 
he related at large unto hym that he was forced 
to run into exile, and beseeching hym to gyve 
hym aid, whereby he may be restorid to his in- 
heritance, which yf it should please him in his 
goodness to grant, he would acknowledge hym to 
be Lorde, and serve hym faithfully during his life. 



Notes. 195 

"This pitifull relation of the distressed king so 
much movid King Henry to compassion as that 
he promised him aid, and willed him to return to 
Bristoll, there to remain until he herd furthir 
from hym ; and with all he wrote to Robert Har- 
ding, requiring hym to receve King Dermond and 
his followers into his house, and to intreat them 
with all courtesie and humanitie he could ; where- 
of Robert failed in nothing. 

" After King Dermond had remained more than a 
month in Bristol, and seeing no hope of aid from 
King Henry, weary of delaye, and comfortless, he 
went to the Erie Richard, intreating succours 
from hym, and promising, that if by his means he 
might be re-established in his kyngdome, that he 
would gyve hym his daughter to wife, and with 
her the whole Kingdom of Leinster for his in- 
heritance. 

"The Erie, tickled with so fair an offer, made 
answeare, that if he could obtain leave of the 
King, his mastir, he would not fail to assiste hym 
in his person, and bring sufficient aid ; but for the 
present he desired to be excused ; for unless the 
King would give his assent therunto, he durst not 
entirtaine a business of that importance. 



ig6 Notes. 

" This faire and discreet answeare so well con- 
tented the exiled King, as he solemnly swore that 
whensoever the Erie did bring aide unto hym, he 
would give him his daughter in marriage, and 
after his death, the Kingdom of Leinster. 

"These conditions being agreed to on either 
party, Dermond departed, and went to St. David's, 
where he staid untill shipping was provided to 
transport hym into Ireland. 



"The King of Leinster finding it to be an im- 
possibility for hym to recovir his kingdome, and 
to prevaile in his designs, without aide out of 
England, dispatched his trusty servant and inter- 
preter, Maurice Regan, with letres in Wales, and 
with authority in his name to promise all such as 
would come to serve hym in his wars in Ireland, 
large recompence in landes of inheritance to 
souche as would staye in the country, and to 
those that would returne, he would gyve them 
good intertainment eyther in money or in cattle. 
As soone as these promises were divulged, men 
of all sortes, and from divers places, preparid 
themselves to goe into Ireland, first, especially 
Robert Fitz-Stephen, a man of good esteeme in 



Notes. jgy 

Wales (who had lately been enlargid out of prison 
by the mediation of Dermond), undirtooke the 
imployment, and with hym some nine or ten 
knights of good account. 

"A.D. 1 169. — This little army, transported in 
three ships, landed at a place called Bann, not far 
from the town of Wexford, from whence they 
immediately dispatched messingers unto King 
Dermond to give him notice of their arrivall, who 
without delay repaired unto them, and imbracing 
them with much joy, and rendering them thanks 
for their travile they had taken, that night they 
encamped by the sea-side. The next day Der- 
mond and the Englishe marched directly to Wex- 
ford, and instantly gave an assault unto the towne, 
in the whiche eighteen Englishe were slain, and 
of the defendaunts only three. Nevertheless, the 
townsmen perceavinge themselves to be unable to 
make any long defence, demanded parle, which be- 
ing graunted, they offered hostages to the King and 
to sware from thence forward to be evermore his 
loyall vassals. By the advice of the Englishe the 
conditions were accepted, and the town of Wex- 
ford rendered itself unto Dermond. Which done, 
he went to Femes, as well to cure his hurt men 



198 Notes. 

as to feast the Englishe, where they rested three 
weeks. 

"Then Dermond called to hym Robert Fitz- 
Stephen and Maurice de Prindergast, tellinge 
them how much they and their nation were feared 
by the Irish ; wherefore he had a purpose to in- 
vade the King of Ossory, his mortal enem^, and 
to chastise hym ; but furst he required their ad- 
vise and consent ; who answered, that they came to 
that land to no othz'r end than to serve hym z'n his 
warrs, and that they would not forsake hym in 
any interprize whatsoever he would undertake." 



Adrian's Bull.— It has been long a disputed 
question among the best writers on Irish history 
as to whether Pope Adrian did or did not issue a 
Bull empowering Henry II. to take forcible pos- 
session of Ireland, and to reform the ecclesiastical 
and other abuses said to be then existing 
therein, though the weight of evidence hitherto 
has been in favor of the authenticity of such a 
document. Except to antiquarians, the matter has 
little practical interest, for Henry did not claim 



Notes. 199 

that country as a dependency of his crown by 
virtue of any authority other than that derived 
from the fact that his subjects Strongbow, Fitz- 
stephen, and others had obtained possession 
of it, and their appearance in Ireland was the 
result of circumstances altogether independent of 
clerical discipline or morals. Nicholas Break- 
speare, afterwards Pope Adrian IV., was the only 
Englishman that ever sat on the papal throne, and 
his national partiality might have misled him into 
giving too credulous an ear to the plausible calum- 
nies of the crafty Normans against a people who 
seem, from the days of Henry to those of Froude, 
to be the special object of English vituperation. 

The Most Rev. Dr. Moran, the learned Bishop 
of Ossory, in Ireland, is of the opinion that the 
Bull was a forgery, and in a recent elaborate com- 
munication gives his reasons for so believing. 
Among other things, he says: 'Indeed, the Irish 
nation at all times, as if instinctively, shrank from 
accepting it as genuine, and unhesitatingly pro- 
nounced it an Anglo-Norman forgery. We have 
already seen how even Giraldus Cambrensis refers 
to the doubts which had arisen regarding the Bull 
of Pope Alexander ; but we have at hand still 



200 Notes. 

more conclusive evidence that Adrian's Bull was 
universally rejected by our people. There is, 
happily, preserved in the Barberini archives, 
Rome, a MS. of the fourteenth century, contain- 
ing a series of official papers connected with the 
pontificate of John XXII., and amongst them is a 
letter from the Lord Justiciary and the Royal 
Council of Ireland, forwarded to Rome under the 
Royal Seal, and presented to His Holiness by 
William of Nottingham, Canon and Precentor of 
St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, about the year 
1325. In this important but hitherto unnoticed 
document, the Irish are accused of very many 
crimes, among which is insidiously introduced 
the rejection of the supposed Bulls: 'More- 
over, they assert that the King of England, under 
false pretences a7id by false Bulls, obtai?ied the domi- 
nion of Ireland, and this opinion is commotily held by 
them' — ' Asserentes etiam Dominum Regem 
Angliae ex falsa suggestione et ex falsis Bullis 
terram Hiberniae in dominium impetrasse ac com- 
muniter hoc tenentes.' This national tradition 
was preserved unbroken throughout the turmoil 
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on 
the revival of our historical literature in the 



Notes. 201 

beginning of the seventeenth century was regis- 
tered in the pages of Lynch, Stephen White> and 
other writers. 

" It will be well also, whilst forming our judg- 
ment regarding this supposed Bull of Adrian, to 
hold in mind the disturbed state of society, es- 
pecially in Italy, at the time to which it refers. 
At the present day, it would be no easy matter in- 
deed for such a forgery to survive more than a 
few weeks. But at the close of the twelfth cen- 
tury it was far otherwise. Owing to the constant 
revolutions and disturbances that then prevailed, 
the Pontiff was oftentimes obliged to fly from 
city to city ; frequently his papers were seized 
and burned, and he himself detained as a hostage 
or prisoner by his enemies. Hence it is that 
several forged Bulls, examples of which are given 
in Cambrensis Eversus, date from these times. 
More than one of the grants made to the Norman 
families are now believed to rest on such for- 
geries; and that the Anglo-Norman adventurers 
in Ireland were not strangers to such deeds of 
darkness appears from the fact that a matrix 
forging the Papal Seal of such Bulls, now pre- 
served from the R. I. Academy, was found a few 



202 Notes. 

years ago in the ruins of one of the earliest 
Anglo-Norman monasteries founded by De 
Courcy. 

" The circumstances of the publication of the 
Bull by Henry were surely not calculated to dis- 
arm suspicion. Our opponents do not even pre- 
tend that it was made known in Ireland till the 
year 1175, and hence, though publicly granted 
with solemn investiture, as John of Salisbury's 
testimony would imply, and though its record was 
deposited in the public archives of the kingdom, 
this Bull, so vital to the interests of the Irish 
Church, should have remained dormant for twenty 
years, unnoticed in Rome, unnoticed by Henry's 
courtiers, still more unnoticed by the Irish 
bishops, and, I will add, unnoticed by the Conti- 
nental sovereigns, so jealous of the power and 
preponderance of the English monarch — for 
such suppositions there is indeed no parallel in 
the whole history of investitures. " 



Public Records.— Much stress having been 
laid on the importance of public records and 
State Paper Office documents as illustrating the 



Notes. 203 

history of Ireland, we take from the Annals of 
Dublin, a.d. 1747, the following extract to show 
how and in what manner these so-called precious 
authorities were preserved and secured from 
spoliation and interpolation : 

"There is no perfect chain of records existing 
through all the several periods of the English 
government, occasioned partly by the decays of 
time, partly by the negligence of officers, and the 
bad condition of repositories in ancient days, and 
partly from the casualties from fire. Of accidents 
of this last kind, there is to be seen an ancient 
memorandum enrolled in the Chancery Office, 
anno 2 Edward II., to this effect: 'Memorandum, 
that all the rolls of the Chance^, were, in the 
time of Master Thomas Cantock, Chancellor of 
Ireland, to the twenty-eighth year of King Ed- 
ward, son to King Henry III., destroyed by an 
accidental fire in the Abbey of the Blessed Virgin 
Mary, near Dublin, at the time when that abbey 
was burned down, except two rolls of the same 
year, which were delivered to Master Waiter de 
Thombury, by the king's writ. The loss is partly, 
supplied by Maurice Regan, partly by Giraldus 
Cambrensis, and the Abbot Benedict, Alan's 



204 Notes. 

Registry, and the Black Book of Christ's Church, 
Dublin.'" 



The Famine of 1846-7-8-9. — In 1841, Ireland 
had a population of 8,175, 125. * n 1851, according to 
the usual rate of increase, she should have had at 
least 9,000,000 ; but the census commissioners re- 
ported only 6,552,385, leaving to be accounted for 
about 2,500,000. It has been very pertinently asked, 
What became of this vast mass of human beings? 
Some have said they emigrated, but this is im- 
possible. In the "Annual Report of the Chief of 
the Bureau of Statistics," Washington, D. C, 1871, 
we find, under the head of alien passengers arrived 
in the United States" from foreign countries from 
1841 to 1850 inclusive, Ireland returned as sending 
only 162,332, and " Great Britain, not specified," 
848,366, who are stated to have been mainly Irish. 
Now, let us suppose that ninety per cent, of the 
latter were natives of Ireland, this would give us 
763,529, to which, if we add the number reported 
as Irish, we find the total emigration of natives 
of Ireland to the United States during that decade 
to have been 925,861, or considerably less than 



Notes. 205 

1,000,000. Though, as it is well known, this re- 
public is the great attraction for all the persecuted 
Celts, still, if we allow that 275,000 went to Eng- 
land and her colonies during the period referred 
to — and we think this is by far too liberal an esti- 
mation — there are still one million three hundred 
thousand to be accounted for. What became of 
them ? The onty intelligent answer that can be 
given is that they died of famine and fever on 
their own soil, the victims of English misrule and 
tyranny. Before Mr. Froude again lectures on 
Ireland, will he please examine these figures? 



Is Froude a Forger?— The following extracts 
from a letter of Col. James F. Meline, author of 
one of the ablest books of the period, " Mary 
Queen of Scots," shows how much reliance can be 
placed on Froude's veracit}'. That worthy him- 
self, in his sixth lecture, declines Col. Meline's 
proposition, on the grounds that he is at one side 
of the Atlantic and his books and papers on the 
other, a mere subterfuge, as our readers will see 
for themselves : 

" If Mr. Froude had been accused in merely 



206 Notes. 

general and sweeping terms of bad faith in his 
treatment of historical documents, he might justly 
say that it is impossible for him to reply to the 
vague and the indefinite, and demand something 
specific. But that is not the case. The charges 
made in the book to which you refer ("Mary 
Queen of Scots, and her latest English Historian ") 
are clear and explicit in every instance, citing 
page and volume, chapter and verse. Wherever 
the historian is charged with unauthorized asser- 
tion or suppression, with interpolation, with adorn- 
ing his ow nlanguage with inverted commas, with 
changing expressions which do not suit him for 
such as do, every such objectionable passage is 
designated by italics or otherwise, and, where he 
claims quotation, confronted with the original in 
such manner as to leave no possible room for 
mistake. Now, these originals are not always Eng- 
lish State papers. Many of them are published 
works ; some relate to French history, some to the 
Simancas papers. A very large number of Mr. 
Froude's historical assertions are totally without 
support or reference, and what are charged as his 
gravest offences — his suggestions, concealment, 
innuendo, attributing of motives, pictorial exa£ r - 



Notes. 207 

geration, and pretended psychological introspec- 
tion — are all matters which utterly elude any such 
test as he proposes. 

"There are few indicted persons who specially 
admire the indictment under which they stand 
charged. There are, probably, still fewer who 
would not prefer one drawn in accordance with 
their wishes, and from which should, first of all, 
be excluded the larger part of the accusations 
made. Of the gravity of the charges in the book 
in question I am perfectly well aware, and so 
state (p. 9). 1 believe I have made them good. 
It is not a mere attempt to show that certain 
passages, as cited by the historian, do not agree 
with the originals. It is an arraignment of his 
historical method, his treatment of authorities, 
his want of fairness, his absence of the judicial 
sense, and what I can only designate as his in- 
trepidity of statement. These are not matters to 
be measured by anything in the State Paper 
Office, and I confess my inability to understand 
why it should be "impossible to reply in detail." 
The work referred to contains some 300 pages. 
The inaccuracies charged may possibly number— 
for I have not counted them— some 400 or 500. 



208 Notes. 

If Mr. Froude were to select from these a few- 
say some sixty or eighty — of the most important, 
and refute them, the book, with all its charges, 
would be injured beyond the power of further 
annoyance. He has, in fact, made a beginning in 
that direction. Why should he not continue ? In 
his eighth volume, he puts a sanguinary threat in 
Mary Stuart's mouth, and cites as his authority a 
letter, 'Randolph to Cecil, Oct. 5. Scotch MSS., 
Rolls House.' He was told that there was no 
such letter in existence, in or out of the Rolls 
House. Claiming that there had been 'either by 
himself or a compositor a clerical error,' he fell 
back upon a letter of another date from the Earl 
of Bedford. The author of the work you refer to 
then sent to the English Record Office for a certi- 
fied copy of the Bedford letter, which turns out 
to be, not a Scotch, but an English MS., and falls 
deplorably short of supporting Mr. Froude's cita- 
tion. A part of this controversy was carried on 
in the columns of your paper, in October, 1870, 
and Chapter VIII. of the book referred to gives 
it in full, together with the Bedford letter." 

A remarkable instance of this "distinguished 
historian's " weakness for perverting quotations 



Notes. 209 

is noticed in one of our leading daily newspapers 
in the following temperate but not less severe 
terms: 

"Another and hardly less striking case we take 
almost at random from the third volume of Mr. 
Froude's 'History of England.' It concerns an 
eminent character in English history whom Mr. 
Froude evidently and most cordially detests— 
Cardinal Pole. It is based not upon any recondite 
manuscript, but upon a passage taken from a well- 
known English historical authority — Strype. Mr. 
Froude's object in this instance is to present 
Cardinal Pole in the light of an arrogant, vain- 
glorious boaster. He says of him : ' He studied 
industriously at Paris and Padua, acquiring, as he 
believed, all knowledge which living teachers 
could impart to him, and he was himself so well 
satisfied with the result that at the mature age of 
thirty-six he could describe himself to Henry as 
one who, though a young man, had ' long been 
conversant with old men ; had long judged the 
eldest man that lived too young for him to learn 
wisdom from.' 'Many ambitious youths,' Mr. 
Froude sneeringly continues, 'have experienced 
the same opinion of themselves ; few have ven- 



210 Notes. 

tured on so confident an expression of it.' The 
reference of the words here quoted by Mr. 
Froude is to Strype, vol. u, p. 305. 

" Now let us see what Strype really gives us as 
the language of Cardinal Pole : 

" ■ Your Grace [to the king] will think I speak as 
a young man. I cannot deny but I am that young 
man that have long judged the eldest that liveth 
at these days too young for me to learn wisdom of 
that have learned of all antiquity, of the most 
antient that ever were aforetime, and of my time 
hath had most acquaintance and most longest 
conversation with these that have been the flower of 
wisdom in our time, which I have sought in all places 
and most enjoyed that wisdom of any young man 
of my time — so that if I were a stock I must needs 
know somewhat. 1 

" Is it possible to imagine a more complete con- 
tradiction than here exists between what Cardi- 
nal Pole is really reported by Strype as saying 
and the sense which Mr. Froude puts upon what 
he claims that he is citing as the language of 
Cardinal Pole from the pages of Strype ?" 

Is it any wonder that a man guilty of such un- 
blushing falsifications of history should decline 



. Notes. 2 1 1 

any challenge that might be offered him as to the 
correctness or fairness of his quotations? And 
if a writer will be guilty of such tergiversation 
toward his own countrymen, how much reliance 
can be placed on his statements regarding a coun- 
try whose nationality and religion are evidently 
the objects of his most intense though ill-dis- 
guised hatred ? J. E. M. 



__1 



An American on the "Situation.' 



Wendell Phillips, whose eloquent lecture on 
O'Connell has for years delighted and instructed 
the thinking people of almost every city and town in 
the Eastern, Middle, and Western States, in a dis- 
course delivered on the third of December, 1872, 
before the elite of Boston, thus takes to pieces the 
elaborately constructed sophisms of the " celebrat- 
ed historian, "and exposes in all their nakedness the 
hollow prejudices of a man who came to us with 
professions of impartiality and fairness on his lips, 
but with deadly and implacable malice in his heart. 
As an American, with no Irish proclivities, and as 
one of the American jury appealed to by Froude, 
his opinions on the questions at issue are of 
peculiar value. We copy his remarks from the 
condensed report of the Boston Daily Advertiser : 

" Ladies and Gentlemen : I am to offer to you 
one or two suggestions touching Mr. Froude's lee- 



An American on the " Situation," 213 

tures on the relations of Great Britain and Ireland. 
He said he came here to argue his case before the 
American people as a jury, and in my narrow way 
I wish to use the hour you lend me to-night in 
rendering a verdict.. It was a great privilege to 
hear an English scholar's view of these critical 
relations between England and Ireland; it was a 
theme deeply interesting to every student of Eng- 
lish literature and politics, and the interest was 
deepened into gratitude when with generous pur- 
pose he gave the receipts of those lectures to the 
sufferers of our great conflagration. I was grati- 
fied, also, at the channel which he chose for his 
address to the American people — the lyceum. It 
was a marked recognition of this new forum for 
the public discussion of great national questions ; 
it was a compliment, well deserved, to the impar- 
tiality and intelligence of the audiences which 
make up the great American lyceum. Of course, 
being Froude, it was brilliant and picturesque in 
narrative, graphic, instructive ; and if he did not 
bring us many new facts, at least in the manner 
in which he told the old ones he revealed the 
mood, the temper of mind, with which England 
looks at the question to-day, and that of itself is 



214 An America?! on the " Situation." 

a great revelation. Home Tooke said once, when 
Gibbon wrote his autobiography, that a man who 
had anything to conceal ought to do anything ra- 
ther than write his own life ; that he should beg 
his worst enemy to write it before he trusted the 
unconscious betrayal of what he would have been 
but too willing to conceal. So I think in the mode, 
in the standpoint, in the whole inspiration of these 
fine testimonies to the relation of Great Britain 
and Ireland we have the latest, and the most au- 
thentic, and the most trustworthy declaration of 
the mode in which the leading Englishmen of to- 
day regard the Irish question. We all had reason 
to expect a scholar's treatment, to expect that he 
would bring order out of chaos, that the tangled 
web of this Irish- history which had confused all 
students and puzzled the most patient enquirer 
would be straightened out and cleared up. For 
one, I never expected the exact statement, the 
close narrative, the logical sequence, or the in- 
stinct of the historian, for I think it cannot be 
said that Mr. Froude has ever written anything 
that deserves the name of history. Fairly judged, 
he is a fervid, brilliant, and earnest writer of 
party pamphlets, and, grouping together these 



An American on the " Situation." 215 

whole fine presentations of the Irish question, 
after all they are so discordant, so partisan, so 
fragmentary, so one-sided, that it only runs in 
the line with the character of his whole literary 
work. If he had not had occasion to name 
frequently the O'Connells, the O'Neills, the Fitz- 
geralds, the Geraldines, the Clairs, and the Des- 
monds, I should hardly have known, as I listened, 
that it was an Irish story. In my hasty way, I 
have had occasion to study somewhat at length 
the history of Ireland in its relations to the British 
government, and I confess, with the exception of 
the dates and the names, I should not have recog- 
nized the picture which the brilliant essayist drew. 
I remember once Mrs. Butler read for us a strik- 
ing extract from " Marmion." I have declaimed it, 
listened to it, sung it, and crooned it over a hun- 
dred times, and when I heard it announced it seem- 
ed to me it would be but a tame piece to listen to ; 
but, when the deep studied and unequalled voice 
and that soul that permeates all her public read- 
ings gave me the piece anew, I thought I had 
never seen it at all. So when I listened to this 
history of Froude's, taking out the names and the 
dates, I did not recognize the story. No doubt, it 



216 An American on the " Situation J 

was fair enough to England. With rare justice, he 
painted her as black as she deserved. That is hon- 
estly to be said. But having given one broad, 
liberal black pigment to the whole canvas, he took 
it all off and brightened up the lines. As it was 
said of Sir Joshua Reynolds that he would pro- 
claim an artist the first of painters, and then in 
detail deny him every quality of the artist, so 
Froude, having told us in a sentence of marvel- 
lous frankness, that Elizabeth was chargeable with 
every fault that a ruler could commit, that she 
lacked every quality of a worthy ruler, went 
on, piece by piece, to say that in no other 
possible way but the one she did could 
she have met the exigencies of her reign. 
Then, when you turn to Ireland, every statement, 
I think, of the Englishman is false ; false in this 
sense, that it clutched at every idle tale which 
reflected upon Ireland, while it subjected to just 
and merciless scrutiny every story that told 
against England. He painted the poverty, the 
anarchy, the demoralization, the degradation of 
Ireland for the last three centuries, as if it stood 
out exceptional in Europe, as if every other king- 
dom was bright, and this was the only dark and 



An American on the '■ Situation" 217 

disgusting spot on the Continent; whereas, he 
knew, and would not if questioned have denied, 
that the same poverty, the same reckless immo- 
rality, the same incredible ignorance which he 
attributed to the population of Ireland, was true 
of France at that day, true of England at the same 
period, truer still of Scotland at every date that 
he named. And then, when he came to the public 
men of Ireland, he painted them monsters of cor- 
ruption, steeped in the utmost subserviency, in 
the most entire readiness to traffic for votes and 
principles, when he knew that, all that being 
granted, these men were only toiling and panting 
in their narrow capacity to lift themselves up to 
the level of the corruption of their English bro- 
thers. He painted every leading Irishman but 
Grattan either as a noisy demagogue or a childish 
sentimentalist ; and even Grattan, when he had 
said that he was honest, he finally ended him by 
painting him as a simpleton. I know that you 
can pick out of his lectures here and there a just 
sentence of acknowledgment; but I am endea- 
voring to give the result of all the discourses — the 
iimpression that would be left on the patient 
listener after hearing them all. Now, it seems to 



2 1 8 An A merican on the * ' Situation . ' ' 

me that all this indicates the partisan, the pamph- 
leteer, the pleader of a cause, not an impartial 
searcher after a great truth, or the generous and 
frank acknowledgment of a great national error. 
Some men were surprised that an Englishman 
should bring to this country a question apparently 
of so little interest as the relations of Ireland, but 
it would be only a superficial thinker that would 
be led into that mistake. The relations of Ireland 
are the gravest, the most important feature of 
England's political life. Eight years ago, I was 
hissed in Cooper Institute for having said that 
England was a second-rate power on the chess- 
board of Europe; but to-day her journalists have 
ceased to deny the fact, and are engaged in an 
explanation of why she is so. And the two great 
influences which have made her fall from a first- 
class power is the neglect and oppression of her 
own masses, and seven centuries of unadulterated 
and infamous oppression of Ireland. Mr. Froude 
told us with epigrammatic force and great truth 
that the wickedness of nations was always pun- 
ished ; that, no matter how long Providence 
waited, in the end the wickedness of a race was 
answered by the punishment of their descendants. 



An American on the " Situation" 219 

England has held for seven centuries to the lips 
of her sister Ireland a poisoned chalice. Its ingre- 
dients were the deepest contempt, the most un- 
measured oppression, injustice, such as the world 
hardly ever saw before. As Mr. Froude said, 
Providence to-day is holding back that same cup 
to the lips of the mother country, which has 
within a dozen years felt the deep punishment of 
her long injustice to Ireland. Ten years ago, 
when Germany pressed to the wall the small king- 
dom of Denmark, which gave to England her 
Princess of Wales, England longed to draw her 
sword ; when, two years ago, Bismarck snubbed 
her in the face of all Europe, again and again 
insulted her, smote her actually in the face, 
England longed to draw her sword, but she 
knew right well that the first cannon she fired at 
any first-rate power Ireland would stab her in 
the back. Checkmated, she cannot move on the 
chess-board of the great powers, and one of the 
great causes of this sudden crippling of her 
powers is the Irish question. I do not wonder 
at all that the thoughtful Englishman should long 
to explain to the world, if he can, how the steps 
by which his country has been brought to this 



220 An American on the " Situation? 1 

step have beem inevitable ; that by no wit of states- 
manship, by no generosity of high-toned and 
magnanimous honor, could she have avoided the 
path in which she is treading. If Mr. Froude 
could make out that proposition, if he could con- 
vince the world through the American people 
that England accepted the inevitable fate which 
the geographical proximity of Ireland had en- 
tailed upon her, it would have gone half way to 
wipe out the clots on his country's fame. I do 
not wonder he should make the attempt. I be- 
lieve that, instead of England's having conquered 
Ireland, in the true, essential statement of the 
case as it stands to-day Ireland has conquered 
England. She has summoned her before the bar 
of the civilized world to judge the justice of her 
legislation ; she has checkmated her as a power 
on the chess-board of Europe; she has monopo- 
lized the attention of her statesmen ; she has 
made her own island the pivot upon which the 
destiny of England turns ; and her last great 
statesman and present prime minister, Mr. Glad- 
stone, owes whatever fame he has to the suppo- 
sition that at last he has devised a way by which 
he can conciliate Ireland and save his own coun- 



An American on the " Situation." 221 

try. But in all the presentations of the case, it 
seems to me that our English friend has been a 
partisan and r.ot a judge. Let me illustrate in 
one or two instances what I consider the justice 
of this charge. The population of Ireland, pre- 
vious to 1811, is wholly matter of guess. There 
never was a census till after this century had 
opened. Sir William Pettie, Tynes Morrison, the 
secretary of Lord Mountjoy, and others have 
formed an estimate of the different periods of the 
population of Ireland. Now, what I charge as a 
proof of partisanship is that, whenever it served 
his purpose to adopt a small guess in order to 
excuse an English injustice or to bear hardly 
down on the critical condition of the Irish, he 
has always selected the smallest possible estimate. 
Whenever it served his purpose, on the contrary, 
to exaggerate the moral inefficiency of the Irish 
people, the divided councils, the quarrelsome 
generations, the totally inefficient race, compares 
with some interval of English rule, he has always 
adopted the largest guess. For instance, the 
historian's estimate of the population of Ireland 
made about the year 1600, the beginning of the 
seventeenth century, by Tynes Morrison, puts it 



222 An American on the " Situation." 

at from 500,000 to 600,000 men. Mr. Froude adopts 
this when he wants to say that James L, in con- 
fiscating six of the best counties in Ireland and 
settling them on his followers, was not very harm- 
ful, because, he says, there were very few inhabi- 
tants in Ireland, and room enough for a great many 
more. I do not see myself by what principle he 
would justify a deposit in confiscating the coun- 
ties of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Middlesex, Bristol, 
and Worcester, turn out all the inhabitants, and 
give the property to aliens, because there was a 
great deal of vacant land in Nebraska ! I do not 
see any exact moral principle. Then he brings us 
down to 1641-49, the era when Cromwell, with 
14,000 troops, subdued Ireland. Then it is his 
purpose, as an advocate, to swell Ireland into 
large proportions, and show you a great people 
swept like a herd of stags before one single power- 
ful English hand. Then he tells you that Sir 
William Pettie has estimated the population of 
Ireland in 1641 at a million and a half of human 
beings, an estimate which Hallam calls prodigi- 
ously vain, and it is one of the most marvellous 
estimates in history. Here was an island, poverty- 
stricken, scourged by war, robbed of its soil, and 



An American on the "Situation" 223 

still it had trebled in population in about thirty- 
eight years, when, with all our multitudinous and 
uncounted emigration, with all our swelling pros- 
perity, with all our industry and peace, with all 
our fruitful lands, and no touch of war — with all 
this, it took our country more time than that to 
treble. It took France 166 years to treble; but 
this poverty-stricken, war-ridden, decimated, 
starved race trebled in a quarter the time. How- 
ever, having put down that point, the advocate 
goes on in order to exaggerate the trebled im- 
morality and frightful fratricidal nature of 
Irish life, and tells you that in the next nine 
years this curious population, which had 
trebled four times quicker than any nation 
in Europe, lost 600,000 in the wars. How the 
wars became so much more dangerous and bloody 
and exhaustive in these nine years than in the 
thirty-eight before nobody explains. He tells us 
there were 900,000 men, women, and children 
when Cromwell came to Ireland. These 900,000 
were the old, the young, the women, the decrepit, 
the home-keepers. Cromwell landed with 14,000 
men, and how many did he meet? How many 
did this population send out to meet him ? Two 



224 An American on the " Situation." 

hundred thousand men ! Every other man in the 
island went out. When France elevated herself 
with gigantic energy to throw back the utter dis- 
grace of German annihilation, how many men did 
she put into the field? One in fifty. When Ger- 
many, moved to the contest for the imperial dig- 
nity of Europe, raised all her power to crush 
France in that terrific struggle, how many did she 
raise? One in thirty-five. When the South, in 
her terrible conflict with us, was said to have 
emptied everything but her game-yards into the 
camps, how many did she send out? One in 
twenty. But this poverty-stricken, decimated, 
women and children population went out one in 
four! 









'%.. s* 



'** 






%$ 




\ 
































o N 















- ^. 


















V .^ 












**> 



-*,. .V 



^ ■*« 












,\ 















• 


















iSSSSfJStil PPNGRESS 

021 342 133 5 



